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NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

PRESENTED BY

GORDON ROPER

NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS

OUR MR. WRENN

THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK

THE JOB

FREE AIR

MAIN STREET

BABBITT

ARROWSMITH

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Author of Main Street, Babbitt, etc.

TORONTO

GEORGE J. McLEOD, LIMITED

PUBLISHERS

The first edition of Arrowsmith consists of
500 copies on handmade paper, numbered and
signed by the author.

Second printing [first trade edition], January, 1925

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN a 0OOEN COMPANY
RAHWAY. N. J.

To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for
most of the bacteriological and medical material in this
tale but equally for his help in the planning of the
fable itself— for his realisation of the characters as liv¬
ing people, for his philosophy as a scientist. With this
acknowledgment I want to record our months of com¬
panionship while working on the book, in the United
States, in the West Indies, in Panama, in London and
Fontainebleau. I wish I could reproduce our talks along
the way, and the laboratory afternoons, the restaurants
at night, and the deck at dawn as we steamed into tropic

t>orts‘ Sinclair Lewis

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/arrowsmithOOOOIewi

ARROWSMITH

CHAPTER I

The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of
the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother
they had buried near the Monongahela — the girl herself had
heaped with torn sods the grave beside the river of the beauti¬
ful name. Her father lay shrinking with fever on the floor
of the wagon-box, and about him played her brothers and
sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.

She’ halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the pick man
quavered, “Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati.
If we could find your Uncle Ed, I guess he’d take us in.” .

“Nobody ain’t going to take us in,” she said. “We’re going
on jus’ long as we can. Going West! They’s a whole lot of

new things I aim to be seeing! ”

She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and

sat by the fire, alone. „

That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.

Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s of¬
fice a boy was reading “Gray’s Anatomy.” His name was
Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac.

There was a suspicion in Elk Mills — now, in 1897, a dowdy
red-brick village, smelling of apples— that this brown-leather
adjustable seat which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations,
for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent
naps, had begun life as a barber’s chair. There was also a
belief that its proprietor must once have been called Doctor
Vickerson, but for years he had been only The Doc, and he
was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.

ARROWSMITH

Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the
New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he
had, at fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid,
assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call
he took charge — though what there was to take charge of,
no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very
tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually
white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variabil¬
ity. The squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of
shoulders saved him from any appearance of effeminacy or of
that querulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call
Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to listen, his right
eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and quivered in his
characteristic expression of energy, of independence, and a
hint that he could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which
had been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday School
superintendent.

Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the
Slavo-Italian immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon
American, which means that he was a union of German,
French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a
little of the strains lumped together as “Jewish,” and a great
deal of English, which is itself a combination of Primitive
Britain, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.

It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson,
Martin was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to
become a Great Healer. He did awe his Gang by bandaging
stone-bruises, dissecting squirrels, and explaining the astound¬
ing and secret matters to be discovered at the back of the
physiology, but he was not completely free from an ambition
to command such glory among them as was enjoyed by the son
of the Episcopalian minister, who could smoke an entire cigar
without becoming sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily
at the section on the lymphatic system, and he muttered the
long and perfectly incomprehensible words in a hum which
made drowsier the dusty room.

It was the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vick¬
erson, facing on Main Street above the New York Clothing
Bazaar. On one side of it was the foul waiting-room, on the
other, the Doc’s bedroom. He was an aged widower; for what
he called “female fixings” he cared nothing; and the bedroom
with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was

ARROWSMITH

cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sani¬
tation.

This central room was at once business office, consultation-
room, operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and ware¬
house for guns and fishing-tackle. Against a brown plaster
wall was a cabinet of zoological collections and medical curi¬
osities, and beside it the most dreadful and fascinating object
known to the boy-world of Elk Mills — a skeleton with one
gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away,
Martin would acquire prestige among the trembling Gang by
leading them into the unutterable darkness and scratching a
sulfur match on the skeleton’s jaw.

On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished
beard. Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested
on a slimy oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the
senile table was a pile of memoranda of debts which the Doc
was always swearing he would “collect from those dead-beats
right now,” and which he would never, by any chance, at any
time, collect from any of them. A year or two — a decade or
two — a century or two— they were all the same to the plod¬
ding doctor in the bee-murmuring town.

The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron
sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates
than for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken
test-tube, a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle
of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty
lancet stuck in a potato.

The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of
Doc Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack of
shoe-boxes in the New York Bazaar: it was the lure to ques¬
tioning and adventure for Martin Arrowsmith.

The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On
the stairway was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson.
The Doc was sober! Martin would not have to help him into
bed.

But it was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the
hall to his bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard
the Doc open the lower part of the washstand, where he kept
his bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long gurgle the invisible

ARRO WSMITH

Doc put away the bottle and decisively kicked the doors
shut. Still good. Only one drink. If he came into the con¬
sultation-room at once, he would be safe. But he was still
standing in the bedroom. Martin sighed as the washstand
doors were hastily opened again, as he heard another gurgle
and a third.

The Doc’s step was much livelier when he loomed into the
office, a gray mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache,
a form vast and unreal and undefined, like a cloud taking for
the moment a likeness of humanity. With the brisk attack of
one who wishes to escape the discussion of his guilt, the Doc
rumbled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:

“What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here?
I knew the cat would drag in something if I left the door
unlocked.” He gulped slightly; he smiled to show that he
was being humorous — people had been known to misconstrue
the Doc’s humor.

He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he
was talking about:

“Reading old Gray? That’s right. Physician’s library
just three books: 'Gray’s Anatomy’ and Bible and Shakespeare.
Study. You may become great doctor. Locate in Zenith and
make five thousand dollars year — much as United States
Senator! Set a high goal. Don’t let things slide. Get train¬
ing.. Go college before go medical school. Study. Chemistry.
Latin. Knowledge! I’m plug doc — got chick nor child —
nobody — old drunk. But you — leadin’ physician. Make five
thousand dollars year.

“Murray woman’s got endocarditis. Not thing I can do for
her. Wants somebody hold her hand. Road’s damn’ dis¬
grace. Culvert’s out, beyond the grove. ’Sgrace.

“Endocarditis and —

“Training, that’s what you got t’ get. Fundamentals.
Know chemistry. Biology. I nev’ did. Mrs. Reverend Jones
thinks she’s got gastric ulcer. Wants to go city for opera¬
tion. Ulcer, hell! She and the Reverend both eat too
much.

“Why they don’t repair that culvert — And don’t be a
booze-hoister like me, either. And get your basic science.
I’ll splain.”

The. boy, normal village youngster though he was, given
to stoning cats and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained some-

ARROWSMITH

thing of the intoxication of treasure-hunting as the Doc strug¬
gled to convey his vision of the pride of learning, the univer¬
sality of biology, the triumphant exactness of chemistry. A fat
old man and dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his grammar
was doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to
his rival, good Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked
in Martin a vision of making chemicals explode with much
noise and stink and of seeing animalcules that no boy in Elk
Mills had ever beheld.

The Doc’s voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair,
blurry of eye and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to
bed, but the Doc insisted:

“Don’t need nap. No. Now you lissen. You don’t ap¬
preciate but — Old man now. Giving you all I’ve learned.
Show you collection. Only museum in whole county. Scien-
tif ’ pioneer.”

A hundred times had Martin obediently looked at the speci¬
mens in the brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles
and chunks of mica; the embryo of a two-headed calf, the
gallstones removed from a respectable lady whom the Doc
enthusiastically named to all visitors. The Doc stood before
the case, waving an enormous but shaky forefinger.

“Looka that butterfly. Name is porthesia chrysorrhcea.
Doc Needham couldn’t tell you that! He don’t know what
butterflies are called! He don’t care if you get trained. Re¬
member that name now?” He turned on Martin. “You
payin’ attention? You interested? Huh? Oh, the devil!
Nobody wants to know about my museum — not a person.
Only one in county but — I’m an old failure.”

Martin asserted, “Honest, it’s slick!”

“Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It’s
an appendix. First one ever took out ’round here. I did it!
Old Doc Vickerson, he did the first ’pendectomy in this neck
of the woods, you bet! And first museum. It ain’t — so big
— but it’s start. I haven’t put away money like Doc Need¬
ham, but I started first c’lection — I started it!”

He collapsed in a chair, groaning, “You’re right. Got to
sleep. All in.” But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke
away, scrabbled about on his desk, and looked back doubt¬
fully. “Want to give you something — start your training.
And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old
man?”

ARROWSMITH

He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for
years he had used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the
lens into his pocket, he sighed, he struggled for something else
to say, and silently he lumbered into his bedroom.

CHAPTER II

The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illi¬
nois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Mid¬
western. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and
sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which
goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city
in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Mid¬
western in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos,
and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties
were not settled till i860.

The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles
from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this
prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a
select college for young gentlemen. The University has a
baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured by the
mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to
give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy,
spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provengal poetry, tariff
schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history
of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of
myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department-store ad¬
vertising. Its president is the best money-raiser and the best
after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac
was the first school in the world to conduct its extension
courses by radio.

It is not a snobbish rich-man’s college, devoted to leisurely
nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and
what they want — or what they are told they want — is a mill
to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play
bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occa¬
sionally mention books, though they are not expected to have
time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its
products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with
perfectly interchangeable parts. Hourly the University of
Winnemac grows in numbers and influence, and by 1950 one

ARROWSMITH

may expect it to have created an entirely new world-civiliza¬
tion, a civilization larger and brisker and purer.

In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science
Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five
thousand students yet it was already brisk.

Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pale, in contrast
to his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a
fair basket-ball center, and a savage hockey-player. The
co-eds murmured that he “looked so romantic,” but as this
was before the invention of sex and the era of petting-parties,
they merely talked about him at a distance, and he did not
know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his
stubbornness he was shy. He was not entirely ignorant of
caresses but he did not make an occupation of them. He con¬
sorted with men whose virile pride it was to smoke filthy
corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.

The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills
did not exist. Doc Vickerson was dead and buried and forgot¬
ten; Martin’s father and mother were dead, leaving him only
enough money for his arts and medical courses. The purpose
of life was chemistry and physics and the prospect of biology
next year.

His idol was Professor Edward Edwards, head of the depart¬
ment of chemistry, who was universally known as “Encore.”
Edwards’ knowledge of the history of chemistry was immense.
He could read Arabic, and he infuriated his fellow chemists by
asserting that the Arabs had anticipated all their researches.
Himself, Professor Edwards never did researches. He sat
before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard.

This evening Encore was giving one of his small and popular
At Home’s. He lolled in a brown-corduroy Morris chair, being
quietly humorous for the benefit of Martin and half a dozen
other fanatical young chemists, and baiting Dr. Norman
Brumfit, the instructor in English. The room was full of
heartiness and beer and Brumfit.

Every university faculty must have a Wild Man to provide
thrills and to shock crowded lecture-rooms. Even in so ener¬
getically virtuous an institution as Winnemac there was one
Wild Man, and he was Norman Brumfit. He was permitted.

ARROWSMITH

without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic,
and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he
remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican. Dr. Brum-
fit was in form, to-night. He asserted that whenever a man
showed genius, it could be proved that he had Jewish blood.
Like all discussions of Judaism at Winnemac, this led to the
mention of Max Gottlieb, professor of bacteriology in the
medical school.

Professor Gottlieb was the mystery of the university. It
was known that he was a Jew, born and educated in Germany,
and that his work on immunology had given him fame in the
East and in Europe. He rarely left his small brown weedy
house except to return to his laboratory, and few students
outside of his classes had ever identified him, but every one
had heard of his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables
fluttered about him. It was believed that he was the son of
a German prince, that he had immense wealth, that he lived
as sparsely as the other professors only because he was doing
terrifying and costly experiments which probably had some¬
thing to do with human sacrifice. It was said that he could
create life in the laboratory, that he could talk to the monkeys
which he inoculated, that he had been driven out of Germany
as a devil-worshiper or an anarchist, and that he secretly
drank real champagne every evening at dinner.

It was the tradition that faculty-members _ did not discuss
their colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be
regarded as anybody’s colleague. He was impersonal as the
chill northeast wind. Dr. Brumfit rattled:

“I’m sufficiently liberal, I should assume, toward the
claims of science, but with a man like Gottlieb — I’m pre¬
pared to believe that he knows all about material forces, but
what astounds me is that such a man can be blind to the
vital force that creates all others. He says that knowledge is
worthless unless it is proven by rows of figures. Well, when one
of you scientific sharks can take the genius of a Ben Jonson and
measure it with a yardstick, then I’ll admit that we literary
chaps, with our doubtless absurd belief in beauty and loyalty
and the world o’ dreams, are off on the wrong track! ” _

Martin Arrowsmith was not exactly certain what this meant
and heJ enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when
Professor Edwards from the midst of his beardedness and
smokiness made a sound curiously like Oh, hell! and took

ARROWSMITH

the conversation away from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore
would have suggested, with amiable malice, that Gottlieb was
a “crapehanger” who wasted time destroying the theories of
other men instead of making new ones of his own. But to¬
night, in detestation of such literary playboys as Brumfit, he
exalted Gottlieb’s long, lonely, failure-burdened effort to syn¬
thesize antitoxin, and his diabolic pleasure in disproving his
own contentions as he would those of Ehrlich or Sir Almroth
Wright. He spoke of Gottlieb’s great book, “Immunology,”
which had been read by seven-ninths of all the men in the
world who could possibly understand it — the number of these
being nine.

The party ended with Mrs. Edwards’ celebrated doughnuts.
Martin tramped toward his boarding-house through a veiled
spring night. The discussion of Gottlieb had roused him to a
reasonless excitement. He thought of working in a laboratory
at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of academic success
and of popular classes. Himself, he believed, he had never
seen the man, but he knew that Gottlieb’s laboratory was in
the Main Medical Building. He drifted toward the distant
medical campus. The few people whom he met were hurry¬
ing with midnight timidity. He entered the shadow of the
Anatomy Building, grim as a barracks, still as the dead men
lying up there in the dissecting-room. Beyond him was the
turreted bulk of the Main Medical Building, a harsh and
blurry mass, high up in its dark wall a single light. He
started. The light had gone out abruptly, as though an agi¬
tated watcher were trying to hide from him.

On the stone steps of the Main Medical, two minutes after,
appeared beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-con¬
tained, apart. His swart cheeks were gaunt, his nose high-
bridged and thin. He did not hurry, like the belated home¬
bodies. He was unconscious of the world. He looked at
Martin and through him; he moved away, muttering to him¬
self, his shoulders stooped, his long hands clasped behind him.
He was lost in the shadows, himself a shadow.

He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor
yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape
with a silver star arrogant on his breast.

ARROWSMITH

On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was
in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more pic¬
turesque than other students, for medics are reputed to know
secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickednesses. Men from the
other departments go to their rooms to peer into their books.
But also as an academic graduate, with a training in the basic
sciences, he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom
had but a high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a
ten-room Lutheran college among the cornfields.

.For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of oper¬
ating, . of making a murderous wrong incision; and with a
more immediate, macabre fear, he thought of the dissecting-
room and the stony, steely Anatomy Building. He had heard
older medics mutter of its horrors: of corpses hanging by
hooks, like rows of ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of
brine in the dark basement; of Henry the janitor, who was
said to haul the cadavers out of the brine, to inject red lead
into their veins, and to scold them as he stuffed them on
the dumb-waiter.

There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin
did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the
Main Medical, up the wide stairs to the office of Max Gott¬
lieb. He did not look at passing students, and when he
bumped into them he grunted in confused apology. It was a«
portentous hour. He was going to specialize in bacteriology ; he
was going to discover enchanting new germs ; Professor Gottlieb
was going to recognize him as a genius, make him an assistant,
predict for him — He halted in Gottlieb’s private laboratory, a
small, tidy apartment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on
the bench, a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the con¬
stant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric
bulbs. He waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a
student, had finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive
at his desk in a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.

If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as
a cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near
at hand, Martin could see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes.
Gottlieb had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with
shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a marvelously
precise chart with red and green curves descending to vanish

ARROWSMITH

at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely
clear; and delicate were the scientist’s thin hands among the
papers. He looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent.
His words were not so much mispronounced as colored with
a warm unfamiliar tint.

“Veil? Yes?”

“Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I’m a
medic freshman, Winnemac B. A. I’d like awfully to take
bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I’ve had a lot of
chemistry—”

“No. It is not time for you.”

“Honest, I know I could do it now.”

“There are two kinds of students that the gods give me.
One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do
not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to
have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to
kill patients. The other kind — they are very few! — they seem
for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle
bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mis¬
takes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I
teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is
to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I demand nothing; of
the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them some¬
thing, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come
back next year.”

“But honestly, with my chemistry — ”

“Have you taken physical chemistry?”

“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”

“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry!
Drug-store chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is
exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry — that is a trade
for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a
year.”

Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to
the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He
slunk off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian
of chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, “Say, Professor,
tell me, is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?”

“Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It pro¬
duces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweet¬
heart’s dress — and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry

ARROWSMITH

lips! Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my
organic chemistry?”

“Nobody. I was just wondering,” Martin complained, and
he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melan¬
choly manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a
bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:

“I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the
bottom of this disease stuff. I’ll learn some physical chemis¬
try. I’ll show old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I’ll discover
the germ of cancer or something, and then he’ll look foolish
in the face! . . . Oh, Lord, I hope I won’t take sick, first time
I go into the dissecting-room. ... I want to take bacteriol¬
ogy — now!”

He recalled Gottlieb’s sardonic face; he felt and feared his
quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles,
and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had
headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.

“I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought
he did? What is Truth?” he puzzled.

Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could
not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray
men lying on the wooden tables. But they were so impersonal,
these lost old men, that in two days he was, like the other
medics, calling them “Billy” and “Ike” and “the Parson,”
and regarding them as he had regarded animals in biology.
The dissecting-room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor,
walls of hard plaster between wire-glass windows. Martin de¬
tested the reek of formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle
other odor seemed to cling about him outside the dissecting-
room; but he smoked cigarettes to forget it, and in a week he
was exploring arteries with youthful and altogether unholy
joy.

His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known
to the class by a similar but different name.

Ira was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man
of twenty-nine, a graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and
of the Sanctification Bible and Missions School. He had
played football; he was as strong and nearly as large as a

ARRO WSMITH

steer, and no steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was
a bright and happy Christian, a romping optimist who laughed
away sin and doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying viril¬
ity preached the doctrine of his tiny sect, the Sanctification
Brotherhood, that to have a beautiful church was almost as
damnable as the debaucheries of card-playing.

Martin found himself viewing “Billy,” their cadaver — an
undersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard
on his petrified, vealy face — as a machine, fascinating, com¬
plex, beautiful, but a machine. It damaged his already feeble
belief in man’s divinity and immortality. He might have kept
his doubts to himself, revolving them slowly as he dissected
out the nerves of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley
would not let him alone. Ira believed that he could bring even
medical students to bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraor¬
dinarily long and unlovely hymns in a chapel of the Sancti¬
fication Brotherhood.

“Mart, my son,” he roared, “do you realize that in this,
what some might call a sordid task, we are learning things
that will enable us to heal the bodies and comfort the souls
of countless lost unhappy folks?”

“Huh! Souls. I haven’t found one yet in old Billy. Hon¬
est, do you believe that junk?”

Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laughter,
slapped Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored,
“Brother, you’ve got to do better than that to get Ira’s goat!
You think you’ve got a lot of these fancy Modern Doubts.
You haven’t — you’ve only got indigestion. What you need
is exercise and faith. Come on over to the Y. M. C. A. and
I’ll take you for a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor
skinny little agnostic, here you have a chance to see the Al¬
mighty’s handiwork, and all you grab out of it is a feeling that
you’re real smart. Buck up, young Arrowsmith. You don’t
know how funny you are, to a fellow that’s got a serene
faith!”

To the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked
at the next table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him,
very painfully, upon the head, and amiably resumed work,
while Martin danced with irritation.

ARROWSMITH

In college Martin had been a “barb” — he had not belonged
to a Greek Letter secret society. He had been “rushed,” but
he had resented the condescension of the aristocracy of men
from the larger cities. Now that most of his Arts classmates
had departed to insurance offices, law schools, and banks, he
was lonely, and tempted by an invitation from Digamma Pi,
the chief medical fraternity.

Digamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table
and low prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at
night, and a good deal of singing about When I Die Don’t
Bury Me at All; yet for three years Digams had won the
valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental
Surgery. This autumn the Digams elected Ira Hinkley, be¬
cause they had been gaining a reputation for dissipation —
girls were said to have been smuggled in late at night — and
no company which included the Reverend Mr. Hinkley could
possibly be taken by the Dean as immoral, which was an
advantage if they were to continue comfortably immoral.

Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room.
In a fraternity, all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are
held in common. When Ira found that Martin was hesitating,
he insisted, “Oh, come on in! Digam needs you. You do
study hard — I’ll say that for you — and think what a chance
you’ll have to influence The Fellows for good.”

(On all occasions, Ira referred to his classmates as The
Fellows, and frequently he used the term in prayers at the
Y. M. C. A.)

“I don’t want to influence anybody. I want to learn the
doctor trade and make six thousand dollars a year.”

“My boy, if you only knew how foolish you sound when
you try to be cynical! When you’re as old as I am, you’ll
understand that the glory of being a doctor is that you can
teach folks high ideals while you soothe their tortured bodies.”

“Suppose they don’t want my particular brand of high
ideals?”

“Mart, have I got to stop and pray with you?”

“No! Quit! Honestly, Hinkley, of all the Christians I
ever met you take the rottenest advantages. You can lick
anybody in the class, and when I think of how you’re going
to bully the poor heathen when you get to be a missionary,

ARROWSMITH

and make the kids put on breeches, and marry off all the
happy lovers to the wrong people, I could bawl!”

The prospect of leaving his sheltered den for the patronage
of the Reverend Mr. Hinkley was intolerable. It was not till
Angus Duer accepted election to Digamma Pi that Martin
himself came in.

Duer was one of the few among Martin’s classmates in the
academic course who had gone on with him to the Winnemac
medical school. Duer had been the valedictorian. He was
a silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather handsome young
man, and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse.
So brilliant was his work in biology and chemistry that a
Chicago surgeon had promised him a place in his clinic. Mar¬
tin compared Angus Duer to a razor blade on a January
morning; he hated him, was uncomfortable with him, and
envied him. He knew that in biology Duer had been too busy
passing examinations to ponder, to get any concept of biology
as a whole. He knew that Duer was a tricky chemist, who
neatly and swiftly completed the experiments demanded by
the course and never ventured on original experiments which,
leading him into a confused land of wondering, might bring
him to glory or disaster. He was sure that Duer cultivated his
manner of chill efficiency to impress instructors. Yet the man
stood out so bleakly from a mass of students who could neither
complete their experiments nor ponder nor do anything save
smoke pipes and watch football -practice that Martin loved
him while he hated him, and almost meekly he followed him
into Digamma Pi.

Martin, Ira Hinkley, Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the meaty
class jester, and one “Fatty” Pfaff wrere initiated into Digamma
Pi together. It was a noisy and rather painful performance,
which included smelling asafetida. Martin was bored, but
Fatty Pfaff was in squeaking, billowing, gasping terror.

Fatty was of all the new Freshmen candidates the most
useful to Digamma Pi. He was planned by nature to be a
butt. He looked like a distended hot-water bottle; he was
magnificently imbecile; he believed everything, he knew
nothing, he could memorize nothing; and anxiously he for¬
gave the men who got through the vacant hours by playing
jokes upon him. They persuaded him that mustard plasters
were excellent for colds — solicitously they gathered about him,
affixed an enormous plaster to his back, and afterward fondly

ARRO WSMITH

removed it. They concealed the ear of a cadaver in his nice,
clean, new pocket handkerchief when he went to Sunday sup¬
per at the house of a girl cousin in Zenith. ... At supper
he produced the handkerchief with a flourish.

Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his
bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had
stuffed between the sheets — soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was
the perfect person to whom to sell useless things. Clif Claw¬
son, who combined a brisk huckstering with his jokes, sold
to Fatty for four dollars a History of Medicine which he
had bought, second-hand, for two, and while Fatty never read
it, never conceivably could read it, the possession of the fat
red book made him feel learned. But Fatty’s greatest benef¬
icence to Digamma was his belief in spiritualism. He went
about in terror of spooks. He was always seeing them emerg¬
ing at night from the dissecting-room windows. His class¬
mates took care that he should behold a great many of them
flitting about the halls of the fraternity.

Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive
days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone.
Knife-gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs
were flung about the room, and covered with backless books,
hockey shoes, caps, and cigarette stubs. Above, there were
four men to a bedroom, and the beds were iron double-deckers,
like a steerage.

For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the
bedroom walls were anatomical charts, to be studied while
dressing. In Martin’s room was a complete skeleton. He and
his roommates had trustingly bought it from a salesman who
came out from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was such
a genial and sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and
told G. U. stories and explained what prosperous doctors they
were all going to be. They bought the skeleton gratefully, on
the instalment plan. . . . Later the salesman was less genial.

Martin roomed with Clif Clawson, Fatty Pfaff, and an
earnest second-year medic named Irving Watters.

Any psychologist desiring a perfectly normal man for use in
demonstrations could not have done better than to have en¬
gaged Irving Watters. He was always and carefully dull;

ARRO WSMITH

smilingly, easily, dependably dull. If there was any cliche
which he did not use, it was because he had not yet heard it.
He believed in morality — except on Saturday evenings; he be¬
lieved in the Episcopal Church — but not the High Church;
he believed in the Constitution, Darwinism, systematic exer¬
cise in the gymnasium, and the genius of the president of the
university.

Among them, Martin most liked Clif Clawson. Clif was the
clown of the fraternity-house, he was given to raucous laugh¬
ter, he clogged and sang meaningless songs, he even practised
on the cornet, yet he was somehow a good fellow and solid,
and Martin, in his detestation of Ira Hinkley, his fear of Angus
Duer, his pity for Fatty Pfaff, his distaste for the amiable
dullness of Irving Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to
something living and experimenting. At least Clif had reality;
the reality of a plowed field, of a steaming manure-pile. It was
Clif who would box with him; Clif who — though he loved to
sit for hours smoking, grunting, magnificently loafing — could
be persuaded to go for a five-mile walk.

And it was Clif who risked death by throwing baked beans
at the Reverend Ira Hinkley at supper, when Ira was bulkily
and sweetly corrective.

In the dissecting-room Ira was maddening enough with his
merriment at such of Martin’s ideas as had not been accepted
in Pottsburg Christian College, but in the fraternity-house he
was a moral pest. He never ceased trying to stop their pro¬
fanity. After three years on a backwoods football team he
still believed with unflinching optimism that he could steri¬
lize young men by administering reproofs, with the nickering of
a lady Sunday School teacher and the delicacy of a charging
elephant.

Ira also had statistics about Clean Living.

He was full of statistics. Where he got them did not matter
to him; figures in the daily papers, in the census report, or in
the Miscellany Column of the Sanctification Herald were
equally valid. He announced at supper table, “Clif, it’s a
wonder to me how as bright a fella as you can go on sucking
that dirty old pipe. D’you realize that 67.9 per cent, of all
women who go to the operating table have husbands who
smoke tobacco?”

“What the devil would they smoke?” demanded Clif.

“Where’d you get those figures?” from Martin.

ARROWSMITH

“They came out at a medical convention in Philadelphia in
1902,” Ira condescended. “Of course I don’t suppose it’ll
make any difference to a bunch of wise galoots like you that
some day you’ll marry a nice bright little woman and ruin
her life with your vices. Sure, keep right on— fine brave virile
bunch! A poor weakling preacher like me wouldn’t dare
do anything so brave as smoke a pipe!”

He left them triumphantly, and Martin groaned, “Ira makes
me want to get out of medicine and be an honest harness-
maker.”

“Aw, gee now, Mart,” Fatty Pfaff complained, “you oughtn’t
to cuss Ira out. He’s awful sincere.”

“Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!”

Thus they jabbered, while Angus Duer watched them in a
superior silence that made Martin nervous. In the study of
the profession to which he had looked forward all his life he
found irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he
saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a
thousand truths far-off and doubtful.

CHAPTER III

John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor
of physiology in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he
was the only teacher in the University of Winnemac who still
wore mutton-chop whiskers. He came from Back Bay; he
was proud of it and let you know about it. With three other
Brahmins he formed in Mohalis a Boston colony which stood
for sturdy sweetness and decorously shaded light. On all
occasions he remarked, “When I was studying with Ludwig
in Germany — ” He was too absorbed in his own correctness
to heed individual students, and Clif Clawson and the other
young men technically known as “hell-raisers” looked for¬
ward to his lectures on physiology.

They were held in an amphitheater whose seats curved so
far around that the lecturer could not see both ends at once,
and while Dr. Robertshaw, continuing to drone about blood
circulation, was peering to the right to find out who was mak¬
ing that outrageous sound like a motor horn, far over on the
left Clif Clawson would rise and imitate him, with sawing arm
and stroking of imaginary whiskers. Once Clif produced the
masterpiece of throwing a brick into the sink beside the plat¬
form, just when Dr. Robertshaw was working up to his annual
climax about the effect of brass bands on the intensity of the
knee-jerk.

Martin had been reading Max Gottlieb’s scientific papers
— as much of them as he could read, with their morass of
mathematical symbols — and from them he had a conviction
that experiments should be something dealing with the foun¬
dations of life and death, with the nature of bacterial infec¬
tion, with the chemistry of bodily reactions. When Robert¬
shaw chirped about fussy little experiments, standard experi¬
ments, maiden-aunt experiments, Martin was restless. In
college he had felt that prosody and Latin Composition were
futile, and he had looked forward to the study of medicine as
illumination. Now, in melancholy worry about his own un-

ARROWSMITH

reasonableness, he found that he was developing the same
contempt for Robertshaw’s rules of the thumb — and for most
of the work in anatomy.

The professor of anatomy, Dr. Oliver O. Stout, was himself
an anatomy, a dissection-chart, a thinly covered knot of
nerves and blood vessels and bones. Stout had precise and
enormous knowledge; in his dry voice he could repeat more
facts about the left little toe than you would have thought
anybody would care to learn regarding the left little toe.

No discussion at the Digamma Pi supper table was more
violent than the incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a
decent normal doctor who made a good living and did not worry
about reading papers at medical associations, of remembering
anatomical terms. But no matter what they thought, they all
ground at learning the lists of names which enable a man
to crawl through examinations and become an Educated Per¬
son, with a market value of five dollars an hour. Unknown
sages had invented rimes which enabled them to memorize.
At supper — the thirty piratical Digams sitting at a long and
spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish
balls and banana layer-cake — the Freshmen earnestly repeated
after a senior:

On old Olympus’ topmost top
A fat-eared German viewed a hop.

Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered
the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor,
trochlear, and the rest. To the Digams it was the world’s
noblest poem, and they remembered it for years after they
had become practising physicians and altogether forgotten
the names of the nerves themselves.

In Dr. Stout’s anatomy lectures there were no disturbances,
but in his dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mild¬
est of them was the insertion of a fire-cracker in the cadaver on
which the two virginal and unhappy co-eds worked. The real
excitement during Freshman year was the incident of Clif
Clawson and the pancreas.

Clif had been elected class president, for the year, because

ARRO WSMITH

he was so full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the
hall of Main Medical without shouting, ‘‘How’s your vermi¬
form appendix functioning this morning?” or “I bid thee a
lofty greeting, old pediculosis.” With booming decorum he
presided at class meetings (indignant meetings to denounce the
proposal to let the “aggies” use the North Side Tennis Courts),
but in private life he was less decorous.

The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents
were being shown through the campus. The Regents were
the supreme rulers of the University; they were bankers and
manufacturers and pastors of large churches; to them even
the president was humble. Nothing gave them more interest¬
ing thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school.
The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on pau¬
pers, and the bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts
which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on
becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr.
Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University,
the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped
near Clif Clawson’s dissecting-table, with his derby hat rever¬
ently held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pan¬
creas.

Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in
your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw
down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had
gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him;
they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should
be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker’s
hat.

Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen.
Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that
any Winnemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker’s hat,
and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand
up and confess.

Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between
Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas.
He growled, “This is outrageous! I’m going to expose Claw¬
son, even if he is a frat-brother of mine.”

Martin protested, “Cut it out. You don’t want to get him
fired?”

“He ought to be!”

Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested,

ARROWSMITH

“Will you kindly shut up?” and, as Ira subsided, Angus be¬
came to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.

When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here,
listening to a Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about
fat-eared Germans, learning the trade of medicine like Fatty
Pfaff or Irving Watters, then Martin had relief in what he
considered debauches. Actually they were extremely small
debauches; they rarely went beyond too much lager in the ad¬
jacent city of Zenith, or the smiles of a factory girl parading
the sordid back avenues, but to Martin, with his pride in taut
strength, his joy in a clear brain, they afterward seemed
tragic.

His safest companion was Clif Clawson. No matter how
much bad beer he drank, Clif was never much more intoxicated
than in his normal state. Martin sank or rose to Clif’s buoy¬
ancy, while Clif rose or sank to Martin’s speculativeness. As
they sat in a back-room, at a table glistening with beer-glass
rings, Clif shook his finger and babbled, “You’re only one ’at
gets me, Mart. You know with all the hell-raising, and all the
talk about bein’ c’mmercial that I pull on these high boys like
Ira Stinkley, I’m jus’ sick o’ c’mmerialism an’ bunk as you
are.”

“Sure. You bet,” Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness.
“You’re jus’ like me. My God, do you get it — dough-face like
Irving Watters or heartless climber like Angus Duer, and
then old Gottlieb! Ideal of research! Never bein’ content
with what seems true! Alone, not carin’ a damn, square-toed
as a captain on the bridge, working all night, getting to the
bottom of things!”

“Thash stuff. That’s my idee, too. Lez have ’nother beer.
Shake you for it!” observed Clif Clawson.

Zenith, with its saloons, was fifteen miles from Mohalis and
the University of Winnemac; half an hour by the huge, roar¬
ing, steel interurban trolleys, and to Zenith the medical students
went for their forays. To say that one had “gone into town
last night” was a matter for winks and leers. But with Angus
Duer, Martin discovered a new Zenith.

At supper Duer said abruptly, “Come into town with me and
hear a concert.”

ARROWSMITH

For all his fancied superiority to the class, Martin was
inimitably ignorant of literature, of painting, of music. That
the bloodless and acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time
listening to fiddlers was astounding to him. He discovered
that Duer had enthusiasm for two composers, called Bach and
Beethoven, presumably Germans, and that he himself did not
yet comprehend all the ways of the world. On the interurban,
Duer’s gravity loosened, and he cried, “Boy, if I hadn’t been
born to carve up innards, I’d have been a great musician!
To-night I’m going to lead you right into Heaven!”

Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and
vast gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with
programs in their laps, unromantic musicians making unpleas¬
ant noises below and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which
made for him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly
became achingly long-winded. He exulted, “I’m going to
have ’em all — the fame of Max Gottlieb — I mean his ability
— and the lovely music and lovely women — Golly! I’m go¬
ing to do big things. And see the world. . . .Will this piece
never quit?”

It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline
Fox.

Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited,
opinionated girl whom Martin had known in college. She was
staying on, ostensibly to take a graduate course in English,
actually to avoid going back home. She considered herself a
superb tennis player; she played it with energy and voluble
swoopings and large lack of direction. She believed herself
to be a connoisseur of literature; the fortunates to whom she
gave her approval were Hardy, Meredith, Howells, and Thack¬
eray, none of whom she had read for five years. She had often
reproved Martin for his inappreciation of Howells, for wearing
flannel shirts, and for his failure to hand her down from
street-cars in the manner of a fiction hero. In college, they had
gone to dances together, though as a dancer Martin was more
spirited than accurate, and his partners sometimes had diffi¬
culty in deciding just what he was trying to dance. He
liked Madeline’s tall comeliness and her vigor; he felt that
with her energetic culture she was somehow “good for him.”

ARROWSMITH

During this year, he had scarcely seen her. He thought of
her late in the evenings, and planned to telephone to her, and
did not telephone. But as he became doubtful about medi¬
cine he longed for her sympathy, and on a Sunday afternoon
of spring he took her for a walk along the Chaloosa River.

From the river bluffs the prairie stretches in exuberant
rolling hills. In the long barley fields, the rough pastures, the
stunted oaks and brilliant birches, there is the adventurous¬
ness of the frontier, and like young plainsmen they tramped
the bluffs and told each other they were going to conquer the
world.

He complained, “These damn’ medics — ”

“Oh, Martin, do you think ‘damn’ is a nice word?” said
Madeline.

He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and con¬
stantly useful to a busy worker, but her smile was desirable.

“Well — these darn’ studes, they aren’t trying to learn sci¬
ence; they’re simply learning a trade. They just want to get
the knowledge that’ll enable them to cash in. They don’t talk
about saving lives but about ‘losing cases’— losing dollars!
And they wouldn’t even mind losing cases if it was a sensa¬
tional operation that’d advertise ’em! They make me sick!
How many of ’em do you find that ’re interested in the work
Ehrlich is doing in Germany — yes, or that Max Gottlieb is
doing right here and now! Gottlieb’s just taken an awful
fall out of Wright’s opsonin theory.”

“Has he, really?”

« Has he! I should say he had! And do you get any of
the medics stirred up about it? You do not! They say, Oh,
sure, science is all right in its way; helps a doc to treat his
patients,’ and then they begin to argue about whether they
can make more money if they locate in a big city or a town,
and is it better for a young doc to play the good-fellow and
lodge game, or join the church and look earnest. You ought
to hear Irve Watters. He’s just got one idea: the fellow
that gets ahead in medicine, is he the lad that knows his
pathology? Oh, no; the bird that succeeds is the one that
gets an office on a northeast corner, near a trolley car junc¬
tion with a ’phone number that’ll be easy for patients to re¬
member! Honest! He said so! I swear, when I graduate
I believe I’ll be a ship’s doctor. You see the world that way,
and at least you aren’t racing up and down the boat trying

26 ARROWSMITH

to drag patients away from some rival doc that has an office
on another deck!”

“Yes, I know; it’s dreadful the way people don’t have ideals
about their work. So many of the English grad students just
want to make money teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship
the way I do.”

It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to
think that she was a superior person quite as much as him¬
self, but he was even more disconcerted when she bubbled:

“At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical,
doesn’t one! Think how much more money — no, I mean how
much more social position and power for doing good a suc¬
cessful doctor has than one of these scientists that just putter,
and don’t know what’s going on in the world. Look at a
surgeon like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in a lovely
car with a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply
worshiping him, and then your Max Gottlieb — somebody
pointed him out to me the other day, and he had on a dreadful
old suit, and I certainly thought he could stand a hair-cut.”

Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation,
religious zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked
old-fashioned rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plan¬
tains the first insects of spring were humming. In the storm
of his fanaticism she lost her airy Culture and squeaked,
“Yes, I see now, I see,” without stating what it was she saw.
“Oh, you do have a fine mind and such fine — such integrity.”

“Honest? Do you think I have?”

“Oh, indeed I do, and I’m sure you’re going to have a won¬
derful future. And I’m so glad you aren’t commercial, like
the others. Don’t mind what they say!”

He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and under¬
standing spirit but also an extraordinarily desirable woman —
fresh color, tender eyes, adorable slope from shoulder to side.
As they walked back, he perceived that she was incredibly the
right mate for him. Under his training she would learn the
distinction between vague “ideals” and the hard sureness of
science. They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy
Chaloosa, a springtime Western river wild with floating
branches. He yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs
of a student and determined to be a pure and extremely indus¬
trious young man, to be, in fact, “worthy of her.”

“Oh, Madeline,” he mourned, “you’re so darn’ lovely!”

ARROWS MITH

She glanced at him, timidly.

He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss
her. It was very badly done. He managed only to kiss the
point of her jaw, while she struggled and begged, “Oh, don’t!”
They did not acknowledge, as they ambled back into Mohalis,
that the incident had occurred, but there was softness in their
voices and without impatience now she heard his denunciation
of Professor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to
her remarks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman
Brumfit, that sprightly English instructor. At her boarding¬
house she sighed, “I wish I could ask you to come in, but it’s
almost supper time and — Will you call me up some day?”

“You bet I will!” said Martin, according to the rules for
amorous discourse in the University of Winnemac.

He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper
bunk at midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now re¬
proving, now warm with trust in him. “I love her! I love
her! I’ll ’phone her— Wonder if I dare call her up as early
as eight in the morning?”

But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal appa¬
ratus to think of ladies’ eyes. He saw Madeline only once,
and in the publicity of her boarding-house porch, crowded with
co-eds, red cushions, and marshmallows, before he was hurled
into hectic studying for the year’s final examinations.

At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its
value to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams
had collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred
Quiz Book; geniuses for detail had labored through the vol¬
ume and marked with red pencil the problems most often set
in the course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring
about Ira Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read
out the questions they were most likely to get. They writhed,
clawed their hair, scratched their chins, bit their fingers, and
beat their temples in the endeavor to give the right answer
before Angus Duer should read it to them out of the text¬
book.

In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty
Pfaff.

Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he had

ARROWSMITH

to pass a special quiz before he could take the finals. There
was a certain fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was
soft, Fatty was superstitious, Fatty was an imbecile, yet they
had for him the annoyed affection they might have had for a
second-hand motor or a muddy dog. All of them worked on
him; they tried to lift him and thrust him through the ex¬
amination as through a trap-door. They panted and grunted
and moaned at the labor, and Fatty panted and moaned with
them.

The night before his special examination they kept him at
it till two, with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity.
They repeated lists — lists — lists to him; they shook their fists
in his mournful red round face and howled, “Damn you, will
you remember that the bicuspid valve is the SAME as the
mitral valve and NOT another one?” They ran about the
room, holding up their hands and wailing, “Won’t he never
remember nothing about nothing?” and charged back to purr
with Active calm, “Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take
it easy. Just listen to this, quietly, will yuh, and try,” coax-
ingly, “do try to remember one thing, anyway!”

They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts
that the slightest jostling would have spilled them.

When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips,
he had forgotten everything he had learned.

“There’s nothing for it,” said the president of Digamma
Pi. “He’s got to have a crib, and take his chance on getting
caught with it. I thought so. I made one out for him yes¬
terday. It’s a lulu. It’ll cover enough of the questions so he’ll
get through.”

Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed
the horrors of the midnight before, went his ways ignoring the
crime. It was Fatty himself who protested: “Gee, I don’t like
to cheat. I don’t think a fellow that can’t get through an ex¬
amination had hardly ought to be allowed to practise medi¬
cine. That’s what my Dad said.”

They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of
Clif Clawson, who wasn’t exactly sure what the effect might
be but who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium
bromide tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty
with some firmness, growled, “I’m going to stick this crib in
your pocket — look, here in your breast pocket, behind your
handkerchief.”

ARROWSMITH

“I won’t use it. I don’t care if I fail,” whimpered Fatty.

“That’s all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can
absorb a little information from it through your lungs, for God
knows — ” The president clenched his hair. His voice rose,
and in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black
draughts and hopeless retreats. “ — God knows you can’t take
it in through your head!”

# They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed
him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They
watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy
trousers.

“Is it possible he’s going to be honest?” marveled Clif Claw¬
son.

“Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk.
And this ole frat’ll never have another goat like Fatty,”
grieved the president.

They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully
blow his nose — and discover a long thin slip of paper. They
saw him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it,
stuff it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute
step.

They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the
fraternity, piously assuring one another, “He’ll use it — it’s all
right — he’ll get through or get hanged!”

He got through.

Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubt-
ings than by Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus
Duer’s rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging.

During the strain of study for examinations Martin was pe¬
culiarly vexing in regard to “laying in the best quality medical
terms like the best quality sterilizers — not for use but to im¬
press your patients.” As one, the Digams suggested, “Say,
if you don’t like the way we study medicine, we’ll be tickled
to death to take up a collection and send you back to Elk
Mills, where you won’t be disturbed by all us lowbrows and
commercialists. Look here! We don’t tell you how you
ought to work. Where do you get the idea you got to tell us?
Oh, turn it off, will you!”

Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, “We’ll admit we’re

ARROWSMITH

simply carpenters, and you’re a great investigator. But there’s
several things you might turn to when you finish science. What
do you know about architecture? How’s your French verbs?
How many big novels have you ever read? Who’s the premier
of Austro-Hungary?”

Martin struggled, “I don’t pretend to know anything — ex¬
cept I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He’s
got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they’re
simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn’t religious,
Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don’t
you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here,
making new concepts of life? Don’t you — ”

Cliff Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, “Praying
in the lab! I’ll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take
bacteriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experi¬
ment hours!”

“Damn it, listen!” Martin wailed. “I tell you, you fel¬
lows are the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work
diagnosis, and here you have a man — ”

So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.

When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a
muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in
iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table,
worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, “Look here, old
son. We’re all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine
is rot, the way we study it, and if you’re so confoundedly hon¬
est, why don’t you get out?”

He left Martin to agonize, “He’s right. I’ve got to shut up
or get out. Do I really mean it? What do I want? What
am, I going to do?”

VII

Angus Duer’s studiousness and his reverence for correct
manners were alike offended by Clif’s bawdy singing, Clif’s
howling conversation, Clif’s fondness for dropping things in
people’s soup, and Clif’s melancholy inability to keep his hands
washed. For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during
the tension of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Mar¬
tin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer
snapped, “Will you kindly not make so much racket?”

ARRO WSMITH

“I’ll make all the damn’ racket I damn’ please!” Clif as¬
serted, and a feud was on.

Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of
his own noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy
in the bath, and with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending
to snore. If Duer was quiet and book-wrapped, he was not in
the least timid; he faced Clif with the eye of a magistrate, and
cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin, “Darn him,
he acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out
of Digam, that’s a cinch, and it won’t be me!”

He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he
who got out. He said that the Digams were a “bunch of bum
sports; don’t even have a decent game of poker,” but he was
fleeing from the hard eyes of Angus Duer. And Martin re¬
signed from the fraternity with him, planned to room with him
the coming autumn.

Clif ’s blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had
no reticences; when he was not telling slimy stories he was
demanding, “How much chuh pay for those shoes — must think
you’re a Vanderbilt!” or “D’l see you walking with that
Madeline Fox femme — what chuh tryin’ to do?” But Martin
was alienated from the civilized, industrious, nice young men
of Digamma Pi, in whose faces he could already see prescrip¬
tions, glossy white sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass
office-signs in the best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian
loneliness, for next year he would be working with Max Gott¬
lieb, and he could not be bothered.

That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in
Montana.

He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb
the poles, digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and
silvery pine, to carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators,
then down and to another pole.

They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove
into little rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was sim¬
ple — they removed their shoes and rolled up in a horse-
blanket. Martin wore overalls and a flannel shirt. He looked
like a farm-hand. Climbing all day long, he breathed deep,
his eyes cleared of worry, and one day he experienced a
miracle.

He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes

ARROWSMITH

opened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw
that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough
pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad-
beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose compan¬
ions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and black¬
birds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life
was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses
were tight tradesmen. What of it? “I’m heret” he gloated.

The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west
wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled elec¬
trical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion
of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were
scientists. They laughed easily and were content to be them¬
selves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble
he was. He had for them an affection such as he had for no
one at the University save Max Gottlieb.

He carried in his bag one book, Gottlieb’s “Immunology.”
He could often get through half a page of it before he bogged
down in chemical formulae. Occasionally, on Sundays or
rainy days, he tried to read it, and longed for the laboratory;
occasionally he thought of Madeline Fox, and became certain
that he was devastatingly lonely for her. But week slipped
into careless and robust week, and when he awoke in a sta¬
ble, smelling the sweet hay and the horses and the lark-ringing
prairie that crept near to the heart of these shanty towns, he
cared only for the day’s work, the day’s hiking, westward to¬
ward the sunset.

So they straggled through the Montana wheatland, whole
duchies of wheat in one shining field, through the cattle-coun¬
try and the sagebrush desert, and suddenly, staring at a per¬
sistent cloud, Martin realized that he beheld the mountains.

Then he was on a train; the wire-gang were already for¬
gotten; and he was thinking only of Madeline Fox, Clif Claw¬
son, Angus Duer, and Max Gottlieb.

CHAPTER IV

Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea
pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were
nervous.

They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled
Petri dishes and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on
potato slices the harmless red cultures of Bacillus prodigiosus,
and they had come now to pathogenic germs and the inocula¬
tion of a living animal with swift disease. These two beady-
eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar, would in two
days be stiff and dead.

Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He
laughed at it, he remembered with professional scorn how fool¬
ish were the lay visitors to the laboratory, who believed that
sanguinary microbes would leap upon them from the mysterious
centrifuge, from the benches, from the air itself. But he was
conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube between the
instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator’s
desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.

The class looked respectful and did not stand too close.
With the flair of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified
the slightest movement of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the
hair on the belly of a guinea pig held by the assistant. He
soaped the belly with one flicker of a hand-brush, he shaved it
and painted it with iodine.

(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness
of his first students, when he had just returned from work¬
ing with Koch and Pasteur, when he was fresh from enormous
beer seidels and Korpsbriider and ferocious arguments. Pas¬
sionate, beautiful days! Die goldene Zeit! His first classes
in America, at Queen City College, had been awed by the
sensational discoveries in bacteriology; they had crowded about
him reverently; they had longed to know. Now the class was
a mob. He looked at them — Fatty Pfaff in the front row,
his face vacant as a doorknob ; the co-eds emotional and fright-

ARROWSMITH

ened; only Martin Arrowsmith and Angus Duer visibly intelli¬
gent. His memory fumbled for a pale blue twilight in Munich,
a bridge and a waiting girl, and the sound of music.)

He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook
them — a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist
above the keys. He took a hypodermic needle from the instru¬
ment-bath and lifted the test-tube. His voice flowed indolently,
with German vowels and blurred W’s:

“This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture of Bacillus
anthracis. You will note, I am sure you will have noted al¬
ready, that in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to
keep the tube from being broken. I cannot advise breaking
tubes of anthrax germs and afterwards getting the hands into
the culture. You might merely get anthrax boils — ”

The class shuddered.

Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger,
so neatly that the medical students who had complained, “Bac¬
teriology is junk; urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab
stuff we need to know,” now gave him something of the respect
they had for a man who could do card tricks or remove an
appendix in seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of the
tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, “Every time you take
the plug from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that
a rule. It is a necessity of the technique, and technique, gen¬
tlemen, is the beginning of all science. It iss also the least-
known thing in science.”

The class was impatient. Why didn’t he get on with it, on
to the entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?

(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the
prison of its battery jar, meditated, “Wretched innocent!
Why should I murder him, to teach Dummkdpje? It would be
better to experiment on that fat young man.”)

He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston
dextrously with his index finger, and lectured:

“Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of
M.D.’s — those to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those
to whom it means compound cathartic. The second kind are
more prosperous.”

(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the
sardonic amiability, the hiss of the S’s, the D’s turned into
blunt and challenging T’s.)

The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched up

ARRO WSMITH

the skin of the belly and punctured it with a quick down
thrust of the hypodermic needle. The pig gave a little jerk,
a little squeak, and the co-eds shuddered. Gottlieb’s wise
fingers knew when the peritoneal wall was reached. He pushed
home the plunger of the syringe. He said quietly, “This poor
animal will now soon be dead as Moses.” The class glanced
at one another uneasily. “Some of you will think that it does
not matter; some of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I
am an executioner and the more monstrous because I am cool
about it; and some of you will not think at all. This differ¬
ence in philosophy iss what makes life interesting.”

While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear
and restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight
in a note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the
bacterial culture. These notes he reproduced on the black¬
board, in his fastidious script, murmuring, “Gentlemen, the
most important part of living is not the living but pondering
upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is
not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate
quantitative notes — in ink. I am told that a great many clever
people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often
observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in
which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus
the world never sees their results and science is not encum¬
bered with them. I shall now inoculate the second guinea pig,
and the class will be dismissed. Before the next lab hour I
shall be glad if you will read Pater’s ‘Marius the Epicurean,’
to derife from it the calmness which is the secret of laboratory
skill.”

As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a
brother Digam, “Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t
got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into
the world and enjoying the fight. But he certainly is handy.
Awfully good technique. He might have been a first-rate sur¬
geon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it is, I don’t
suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!”

Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordi¬
narily kindly man, this huge and bumbling parson. He rever¬
ently accepted everything, no matter how contradictory to
everything else, that his medical instructors told him, but this

ARRO WSMITH

killing of animals — he hated it. By a connection not evident to
him he remembered that the Sunday before, in the slummy
chapel where he preached during his medical course, he had
exalted the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the
blood of the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from
Emmanuel’s veins, but this meditation he lost, and he lum¬
bered toward Digamma Pi in a fog of pondering pity.

. Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Ffaff, shouted, “Gosh, ole
pig certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle
home!” and Fatty begged, “Don’t! Please!”

But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experi¬
ment and, as he remembered Gottlieb’s unerring fingers, his
hands curved in imitation.

The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days
they rolled over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dra¬
matic expectation, the class reassembled for the necropsy. On
the demonstrator’s table was a wooden tray, scarred from the
tacks which for years had pinned down the corpses. The
guinea pigs were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled. The
class tried to remember how nibbling and alive they had been.
The assistant stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks.
Gottlieb swabbed its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol’
sht it from belly to neck, and cauterized the heart with a red-
hot spatula— the class quivered as they heard the searing of
the flesh. Like a priest of diabolic mysteries, he drew out the
blackened blood with a pipette. With the distended lungs
the spleen and kidneys and liver, the assistant made wavy
smears on glass slides which were stained and given to the
class for examination. The students who had learned to look
through the microscope without having to close one eye were
proud and professional, and all of them talked of the beauty
of identifying the bacillus, as they twiddled the brass thumb¬
screws to the. right focus and the cells rose from cloudiness
to sharp distinctness on the slides before them. But they
were uneasy for Gottlieb remained with them that day, stalk-

!"g fi!hT-d theT’ fsayinfi not.hing, watching them always, watch¬
ing the disposal of the remains of the guinea pigs, and along the
enches ran nervous rumors about a bygone student who had
died from anthrax infection in the laboratory.

ARROWSMITH

There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying
delight; the zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the
prairie, the bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of crea¬
tion. He woke early and thought contentedly of the day; he
hurried to his work, devout, unseeing.

The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy
to him — the students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gela¬
tine, their fingers gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves;
or heating media in an autoclave like a silver howitzer. The
roaring Bunsen flames beneath the hot-air ovens, the steam
from the Arnold sterilizers rolling to the rafters, clouding the
windows, were to Martin lovely with activity, and to him the
most radiant things in the world were rows of test-tubes filled
with watery serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee
brown, a fine platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a
fantastic hedge of tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars,
or a bottle rich with gentian violet stain.

He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to
work by himself in the laboratory at night. . . . The long
room was dark, thick dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his
microscope. The cone of light cast a gloss on the bright brass
tube, a sheen on his black hair, as he bent over the eyepiece.
He was studying trypanosomes from a rat — an eight-branched
rosette stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster of
organisms delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei,
their light blue cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was
excited and a little proud ; he had stained the germs perfectly,
and it is not easy to stain a rosette without breaking the petal
shape. In the darkness, a step, the weary step of Max Gott¬
lieb, and a hand on Martin’s shoulder. Silently Martin raised
his head, pushed the microscope toward him. Bending down, a
cigarette stub in his mouth — the smoke would have stung the
eyes of any human being — Gottlieb peered at the preparation.

He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, “Splen¬
did! You have craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science —
for a few. You Americans, so many of you — all full with ideas,
but you are impatient with the beautiful dullness of long labors.
I see already — and I watch you in the lab before — perhaps you
may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. They are very,
very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It is quite

ARRO WSMITH

a nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent, of
the people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think
you might work on the bugs.”

Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in battle.

“I shall have,” said Gottlieb, “a little sandwich in my room
at midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should
be very pleast if you would come to have a bite.”

Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb’s immacu¬
late laboratory at midnight. On the bench were coffee and
sandwiches, curiously small and excellent sandwiches, foreign
to Martin’s lunch-room taste.

Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus
Duer seemed but an absurd climber. He summoned forth
London laboratories, dinners on frosty evenings in Stockholm,
walks on the Pincio with sunset behind the dome of San Pietro,
extreme danger and overpowering disgust from excreta-
smeared garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve
slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family
as though Martin were a contemporary.

The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin,
a rabbi, who was tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick
wife — it might be cancer. The three children — the youngest
girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but the boy, the four¬
teen-year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would not
study. Himself, he had worked for years on the synthesis
of antibodies ; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis
there was no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but
he was having an agreeable time massacring the opsonin the¬
ory, and that cheered him.

“No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people
that claim too much, but I have dreams of real discoveries
some day. And — No. Not five times in five years do I
have students who understand craftsmanship and precision
and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t’ink per¬
haps you may have them. If I can help you — So!

“I do not t’ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are
fine — often they are artists — but their trade, it is not for us
lonely ones that work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label.
In Heidelberg that was — Herr Gott, back in 1875! I could
not get much interested in bandaging legs and looking at
tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz — what a wild blither¬
ing young fellow! I tried to make researches into the physics

ARROWSMITH

of sound — I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in
this wale of tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative
method. And I was a chemist — a fine stink-maker was I.
And so into biology and much trouble. It has been good. I
have found one or two things. And if sometimes I feel an
exile, cold — I had to get out of Germany one time for refus¬
ing to sing Die Wacht am Rhein and trying to kill a cavalry
captain — he was a stout fellow — I had to choke him — you
see I am boasting, but I was a lifely Kerl thirty years ago!
Ah! So!

“There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist.
Why should we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are
we too sure, when we regard these oh, most unbeautiful young
students attending Y. M. C. A.’s and singing dinkle-songs and
wearing hats with initials burned into them — iss it worth while
to protect them from the so elegantly functioning Bacillus
typhosus with its lovely flagella? You know, once I asked
Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic
germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But
he did not care for my met’od. Oh, well, he is older than I
am ; he also gives, I hear, some dinner parties with bishops and
judges present, all in nice clothes. He would know more than
a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche and Father Schopen¬
hauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and Father
Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and
Brother Arrhenius. Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look
at your slides and so good-night.”

When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house,
his face as reticent as though the midnight supper and all the
rambling talk had never happened, Martin ran home, alto¬
gether drunk.

CHAPTER V

Though bacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was
the theory of the university that he was also studying pathol¬
ogy, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to
swamp a genius.

Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered
wall-paper, piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors.
They made their own breakfasts; they dined on hash at the
Pilgrim Lunch Wagon or the Dew Drop Inn. Clif was occa¬
sionally irritating; he hated open windows; he talked of dirty
socks; he sang “Some Die of Diabetes” when Martin was
studying; and he was altogether unable to say anything di¬
rectly. He had to be humorous. He remarked, “Is it your
combobulatory concept that we might now feed the old faces?”
or “How about ingurgitating a few calories?” But he had
for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for by his
cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage. The whole
of Clif was more than the sum of his various parts.

In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of
his recent associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally pro¬
tested that the Reverend Ira Hinkley was a village policeman
and Irving Watters a plumber, that Angus Duer would walk
to success over his grandmother’s head, and that for an idiot
like Fatty Pfaff to practise on helpless human beings was
criminal, but mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest.
And when he had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and
discovered how remarkably much he did not know, he was curi¬
ously humble.

If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was
more so in his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the
trick of using the word “control” in reference to the person or
animal or chemical left untreated during an experiment, as
a standard for comparison; and there is no trick more infuri¬
ating. When a physician boasted of his success with this
drug or that electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted, “Where

ARROWSMITH

was your control? How many cases did you have under
identical conditions, and how many of them did not get the
treatment?” Now Martin began to mouth it — control, control,
control, where’s your control? where’s your control? — till most
of his fellows and a few of his instructors desired to lynch him.

He was particularly tedious in materia medica.

The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would
have been an illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular.
From him a future physician could learn that most important of
all things: the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when
you cannot discover what is the matter with him. His classes
listened with zeal, and memorized the sacred hundred and fifty
favorite prescriptions. (He was proud that this was fifty more
than his predecessor had required.)

But Martin was rebellious. He inquired, and publicly, “Dr.
Davidson, how do they know ichthyol is good for erysipelas?
Isn’t it just rotten fossil fish — isn’t it like the mummy-dust and
puppy-ear stuff they used to give in the olden days?”

“How do they know? Why, my critical young friend, be¬
cause thousands of physicians have used it for years and found
their patients getting better, and that’s how they know!”

“But honest, Doctor, wouldn’t the patients maybe have got¬
ten better anyway? Wasn’t it maybe a post hoc, propter hoc?
Have they ever experimented on a whole slew of patients to¬
gether, with controls?” .

“Probably not — and until some genius like yourself, Arrow-
smith, can herd together a few hundred people with exactly
identical cases of erysipelas, it probably never will be tried!
Meanwhile I trust that you other gentlemen, who perhaps lack
Mr. Arrowsmith’s profound scientific attainments and the power
to use such handy technical terms as ‘control,’ will, merely on
my feeble advice, continue to use ichthyol!”

But Martin insisted, “Please, Dr. Davidson, what s the use
of getting all these prescriptions by heart, anyway? We 11
forget most of ’em, and besides, we can always look ’em up in
the book.”

Davidson pressed his lips together, then:

“Arrowsmith, with a man of your age I hate to answer you
as I would a three-year-old boy, but apparently I must. There¬
fore, you will learn the properties of drugs and the contents of
prescriptions because I tell you to! If I did not hesitate to
waste the time of the other members of this class, I would try

ARROWSMITH

to convince you that my statements may be accepted, not on
my humble authority, but because they are the conclusions of
wise men — men wiser or certainly a little older than you, my
friend— through many ages. But as I have no desire to indulge
in fancy flights of rhetoric and eloquence, I shall merely say
that you will accept, and you will study, and you will memorize,
because I tell you to!”

Martin considered dropping his medical course and specializ¬
ing in bacteriology. He tried to confide in Clif, but Clif had
become impatient of his fretting, and he turned again to the
energetic and willowy Madeline Fox.

Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not
complete his medical course, then see what he wanted to do?

They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the
University Dramatic Society play. Madeline’s widowed mother
had come to live with her, and they had taken a top-floor flat
in one of the tiny apartment-houses which were beginning to
replace the expansive old wooden houses of Mohalis. The flat
was full of literature and decoration: a bronze Buddha from
Chicago, a rubbing of Shakespeare’s epitaph, a set of Anatole
France in translation, a photograph of Cologne cathedral, a
wicker tea-table with a samovar whose operation no one in
the university understood, and a souvenir post-card album.
Madeline’s mother was a Main Street dowager duchess. She
was stately and white-haired but she attended the Methodist
Church. In Mohalis she was flustered by the chatter of the
students; she longed for her home-town, for the church so¬
ciables and the meetings of the women’s club — they were
studying Education this year and she hated to lose all the
information about university ways.

With a home and a chaperone, Madeline began to “enter¬
tain”: eight-o’clock parties with coffee, chocolate cake, chicken
salad, and word-games. She invited Martin, but he was jealous
of his evenings, beautiful evenings of research. The first affair
to which she enticed him was her big New Year’s Party in
January. They “did advertisements” — guessed at tableaux
representing advertising pictures; they danced to the phono¬
graph; and they had not merely a lap-supper but little tables
excessively covered with doilies.

ARROW SMITH

Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he bad
come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper,
by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his danc¬
ing was rusty, and he envied the senior who could do the new
waltz called the “Boston.” There was no strength, no grace,
no knowledge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when
consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his ab¬
sorption. If he was but little greedy for possessions, he was
hungry for every skill.

His reluctant wonder at the others was drowned in his
admiration for Madeline. He had known her as a jacketed
outdoor girl, but this was an exquisite indoor Madeline, slender
in yellow silk. She seemed to him a miracle of tact and ease
as she bullied her guests into an appearance of merriment.
She had need of tact, for Dr. Norman Brumfit was there, and
it was one of Dr. Brumfit’s evenings to be original and naughty.
He pretended to kiss Madeline’s mother, which vastly dis¬
comforted the poor lady; he sang a strongly improper negro
song containing the word hell; he maintained to a group of
women graduate students that George Sand’s affairs might per¬
haps be partially justified by their influence on men of talent;
and when they looked shocked, he pranced a little, and his
eye-glasses glittered.

Madeline took charge of him. She trilled, “Dr. Brumfit,
you’re terribly learned and so on and so forth, and sometimes
in English classes I’m simply scared to death of you, but other
times you’re nothing but a bad small boy, and I won’t have
you teasing the girls. You can help me bring in the sherbet,
that’s what you can do.”

Martin adored her. He hated Brumfit for the privilege of
disappearing with her into the closet-like kitchen of the flat.
Madeline! She was the one person who understood him!
Here, where every one snatched at her and Dr. Brumfit beamed
on her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was precious,
she was something he must have.

On pretense of helping her set the tables, he had a moment
with her, and whimpered, “Lord, you’re so lovely!”

“I’m glad you think I’m a wee bit nice.” She, the rose and
the adored of all the world, gave him her favor.

“Can I come call on you to-morrow evening?”

“Well, I— Perhaps.”

ARROWSMITH

It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who
was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker
after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and
bogged himself in every obvious morass, that Martin’s inten¬
tions toward Madeline Fox were what is called “honorable.”
He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student
who would have to wait for years before he could make a
living. Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He
wanted — like most poor and ardent young men in such a case,
he wanted all he could get.

As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adven¬
ture. He pictured her melting; he felt her hand glide down
his cheek. He warned himself, “Don’t be a fool now! Prob¬
ably nothing doing at all. Don’t go get all worked up and then
be disappointed. She’ll probably cuss you out for something
you did wrong at the party. She’ll probably be sleepy and
wish you hadn’t come. Nothing!” But he did not for a
second believe it.

He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down
the meager hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the
over-bright living-room — and he found her mother, solid as a
pyramid, permanent-looking as sunless winter.

But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him
to conquest.

Mother did not.

In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to de¬
part is ten o’clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven
Martin did battle with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two lan¬
guages, an audible gossip and a mute but furious protest, while
Madeline — she was present; she sat about and looked pretty.
In an equally silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him, till the
room was thick with their antagonism, while they seemed to
be discussing the weather, the university, and the trolley
service into Zenith.

“Yes, of course, some day I guess they’ll have a car every
twenty minutes,” he said weightily.

(“Darn her, why doesn’t she go to bed? Cheers! She’s
doing up her knitting. Nope. Damn it! She’s taking another
ball of wool.”)

ARROW SMITH

“Oh, yes, I’m sure they’ll have to have better service,” said
Mrs. Fox.

(“Young man, I don’t know much about you, but I don’t
believe you’re the right kind of person for Madeline to go
with. Anyway, it’s time you went home.”)

“Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service.”

(“I know I’m staying too long, and I know you know it,
but I don’t care!”)

It seemed impossible that Mrs. Fox should endure his stolid
persistence. He used thought-forms, will-power, and hypno¬
tism, and when he rose, defeated, she was still there, extremely
placid. They said good-by not too warmly. Madeline took
him to the door; for an exhilarating half-minute he had her
alone.

“I wanted so much — I wanted to talk to you!”

“I know. I’m sorry. Some time!” she muttered.

He kissed her. It was a tempestuous kiss, and very sweet.

Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary
party with the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the
social page for the Zenith Advocate-Times — Madeline leaped
into an orgy of jocund but extraordinarily tiring entertain¬
ments, and Martin obediently and smolderingly followed her.
She appeared to have trouble in getting enough men, and to
the literary evening Martin dragged the enraged Clif Clawson.
Clif grumbled, “This is the damnedest zoo of sparrows I ever
did time in,” but he bore off treasure — he had heard Madeline
call Martin by her favorite name of “Martykins.” That was
very valuable. Clif called him Martykins. Clif told others
to call him Martykins. Fatty Pfaff and Irving Watters called
him Martykins. And when Martin wanted to go to sleep,
Clif croaked:

“Yuh, you’ll probably marry her. She’s a dead shot. She
can hit a smart young M.D. at ninety paces. Oh, you’ll have
one fine young time going on with science after that skirt sets
you at tonsil-snatching. . . . She’s one of these literary birds.
She knows all about lite’ature except maybe how to read. . . .
She’s not so bad-looking, now. She’ll get fat, like her Ma.”

Martin said that which was necessary, and he concluded,

ARROWSMITH

“She’s the only girl in the graduate school that’s got any pep.
The others just sit around and talk, and she gets up the best
parties — ”

“Any kissing parties?”

“Now you look here! I’ll be getting sore, first thing you
know! You and I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox — she’s
like Angus Duer, some ways. I realize all the stuff we’re miss¬
ing: music and literature, yes, and decent clothes, too — no
harm to dressing well — ”

“That’s just what I was tellin’ you! She’ll have you all
dolled up in a Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing
everything as rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-
flushing dame — Where’s your control?”

Clif’s opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely
with a sly and avaricious interest but with a dramatic con¬
viction that he longed to marry her.

Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Im¬
prove their men, and To Improve means to change a person
from what he is, whatever that may be, into something else.
Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not
work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for more than
a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that
he was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes — his
corduroys and soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat —
at his vocabulary and his taste in fiction, with new and more
patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way of saying, “Why, of course
everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest thinker” irri¬
tated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb’s dark patience.

“Oh, let me alone!” he hurled at her. “You’re the nicest
thing the Lord ever made, when you stick to things you know
about, but when you spring your ideas on politics and chemo¬
therapy — Darn it, quit bullying me! I guess you’re right
about slang. I’ll cut out all this junk about ‘feeding your
face’ and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled collar!
I won’t!”

He might never have proposed to her but for the spring
evening on the roof.

She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden.
She had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench

ARROWSMITH

like those once beheld in cemetery plots ; she had hung up two
Japanese lanterns — they were ragged and they hung crooked.
She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-
house, who were “so prosaic, so conventional, that they never
came up to this darling hidey-place.” She compared her refuge
to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a
Japanese garden, to a “pleasaunce of old Provengal.” But to
Martin it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was
vaguely ready for a quarrel, that April evening when he called
on Madeline and her mother sniffily told him that she was to
be found on the roof.

“Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections,”
he grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.

Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin
in her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery
excitement but with a noncommittal “Hello.” She seemed
spiritless. He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the
pathos in her pretense that this stretch of tar -paper and slatted
walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped,
“Say, that’s a dandy new strip of matting you’ve put down.”

“It is not! It’s mangy!” She turned toward him. She
wailed, “Oh, Mart, I’m so sick of myself, to-night. I’m always
trying to make people think I’m somebody. I’m not. I’m a
bluff.”

“What is it, dear?”

“Oh, it’s lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him — only he was right —
he as good as told me that if I don’t work harder I’ll have to
get out of the graduate school. I’m not doing a thing, he said,
and if I don’t have my Ph.D., then I won’t be able to land
a nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I’d better
land one, too, because it doesn’t look to poor Madeline as if
anybody was going to marry her.”

His arm about her, he blared, “I know exactly who — ”

“No, I’m not fishing. I’m almost honest, to-night. I’m no
good, Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don’t sup¬
pose they believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!”

“They do not! If they did — I’d like to see anybody that
tried laughing — ”

“It’s awfully sweet and dear of you, but I’m not worth it.
The poetic Madeline! With her ree-fined vocabulary! I’m a
— I’m a — Martin, I’m a tin-horn sport! I’m everything your
friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you needn’t tell me. I know

ARROWSMITH

what he thinks. And — I’ll have to go home with mother,
and I can’t stand it, dear, I can’t stand it! I won’t go back!
That town! Never anything doing! The old tabbies, and the
beastly old men, always telling the same old jokes. I won’t!”

Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping,
hard; he was stroking her hair, not covetously now but ten¬
derly, and he was whispering:

“Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You’re
going to marry me and — Take me couple more years to
finish my medical course and couple in hospital, then we’ll be
married and — By thunder, with you helping me, I’m going
to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We’re going to have
everything!”

“Dearest, do be wise. I don’t want to keep you from your
scientific work — ”

“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up some research.
But thunder, I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing
your way through. Competing with real men in real he-
struggle. If I can’t do that and do some scientific work too,
I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I want to take
advantage of it, but afterward — Oh, Madeline!”

Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.

He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain
that she would demand, “Young man, how do you expect to
support my Maddy? And you use bad language.” But she
took his hand and mourned, “I hope you and my baby will
be happy. She’s a dear good girl, even if she is a little flighty
sometimes, and I know you’re nice and kind and hard-working.
I shall pray you’ll be happy — oh, I’ll pray so hard! You
young people don’t seem to think much of prayer, but if you
knew how it helped me — Oh, I’ll petition for your sweet
happiness!”

She was weeping; she kissed Martin’s forehead with the dry,
soft, gentle kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping
with her.

At parting Madeline whispered, “Boy, I don’t care a bit,
myself, but Mother would love it if we went to church with
her. Don’t you think you could, just once?”

The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Claw-

ARROWSMITH

son, had the spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a
painful linen collar, and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying
Mrs. Fox and the chastely chattering Madeline to the Mohalis
Methodist Church, to hear the Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab
discourse on “The One Way to Righteousness.”

They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with
a holy gloating at Martin’s captivity.

For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of
the human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such
a thing as progress, that events meant something, that people
could learn something, that if Madeline had once admitted she
was an ordinary young woman who occasionally failed, then
she was saved. He was bewildered when she began improv¬
ing him more airily than ever. She complained of his vul¬
garity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. “You
think it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I
wonder if it isn’t just laziness. You like to day-dream around
labs. Why should you be spared the work of memorizing
your materia medica and so on and so forth? All the others
have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to grow up
and listen to reason.”

In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiv¬
ing smile, he was whirled through to the end of the term.

A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend
twenty-four hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in
grinding for examinations, and twenty-four in the bacterio¬
logical laboratory, he promised Clif that he would spend that
summer vacation with him, working as a waiter in a Canadian
hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and with her walked
through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural Experiment
Station grounds.

“You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson,” she
complained. “I don’t suppose you care to hear my opinion
of him.”

“I’ve had your opinion, my beloved.” Martin sounded ma¬
ture, and not too pleasant.

“Well, I can tell you right now you haven’t had my opinion
of your being a waiter! For the life of me I can’t understand
why you don’t get some gentlemanly job for vacation, instead

ARROWSMITH

of hustling dirty dishes. Why couldn’t you work on a news¬
paper, where you’d have to dress decently and meet nice
people?”

“Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I
won’t work at all this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway.
I’ll go to Newport and play golf and wear a dress suit every
night.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It’s
like Burns says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are
you so proud of being a roughneck? Do stop being smart, for
a minute. Listen to the night. And smell the cherry blos¬
soms. ... Or maybe a great scientist like you, that’s so supe¬
rior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!”

“Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has
been gone for weeks now, you’re dead right.”

“Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but —
Will you be so good as to tell me what that pale white mass
is up there?”

“I will. It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”

“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m
ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing
smart aleck — ”

“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps
nag-nag-naggin’ and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long — ”

They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they
parted forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very
rudely, near a fraternity-house where students were singing
heart-breaking summer songs to a banjo.

In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif
to the North Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his long¬
ing for her soft flesh and for her willingness to listen to him,
he was only a little excited that he should have led the class
in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb should have appointed
him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.

CHAPTER VI

The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines,
were all of them university students. They were not sup¬
posed to appear at the Lodge dances — they merely appeared,
and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denun¬
ciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but seven
hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and
tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis
placid — and enormously in love with Madeline.

They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and
once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the sum¬
mer she had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio
border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin’s native Elk
Mills but more sun-baked, more barren with little factories.
She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:

Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to
know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science
& ideals & education, etc. — I certainly appreciate them here when I
listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about
their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so
on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something
didn’t I ? I cant always be in the wrong can I ?

“My dear, my little girl ! ” he lamented. “ ‘Can’t always be
in the wrong’! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”

By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he
was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling
Wisconsin school-teacher with ankles, he so longed for Made¬
line that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and
fleeing to her caresses — lay awake for minutes at a time.

The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted
at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after,
they were clinging together in the quiet of her living-room.
It is true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at
Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all school-teachers, but to his
fury she yielded in tears.

ARROWSMITH

His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on
physical diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gyne¬
cology in the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the
afternoon ; to supervise the making of media and the steriliza¬
tion of glassware for Gottlieb; to instruct a new class in the
use of microscope and filter and autoclave; to read a page
now and then of scientific German or French; to see Madeline
constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to hysterical
hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first original re¬
search — his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.

He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that
if he mixed serum taken from these immune animals with
typhoid germs, the germs would die. Unfortunately — he felt —
the germs grew joyfully. He was troubled; he was sure that
his technique had been clumsy; he performed his experiment
over and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to ponder
on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was
an inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.)
When he was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing
something she ought not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, pro¬
testing, “The darn’ bugs ought to die in this immune serum,
but they don’t. There’s something wrong with the theories.”

“Young man, do you set yourself up against science?” grated
Gottlieb, flapping the papers on his desk. “Do you feel com¬
petent, huh, to attack the dogmas of immunology?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help what the dogma is. Here’s
my protocols. Honestly, I’ve gone over and over the stuff,
and I get the same results, as you can see. I only know what
I observe.”

Gottlieb beamed. “I give you, my boy, my episcopal bless¬
ings! That is the way! Observe what you observe, and if it
does violence to all the nice correct views of science — out they
go! I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why,
the underneath principle.”

Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him “Arrowsmith” or “You” or
“Uh.” When he was furious he called him, or any other stu¬
dent, “Doctor.” It was only in high moments that he honored
him with “Martin,” and the boy trotted off blissfully, to try
to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why that made
everything so.

ARRO WSM ITH

Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith Gen¬
eral Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an in¬
teresting patient. The bored reception clerk — who was inter¬
ested only in obtaining the names, business addresses, and re¬
ligions of patients, and did not care who died or who spat
on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about
collecting meningococci, so long as the addresses were prop¬
erly entered — loftily told him to go up to Ward D. Through
the long hallways, past numberless rooms from which peered
yellow-faced old women sitting up in bed in linty nightgowns,
Martin wandered, trying to look important, hoping to be taken
for a doctor, and succeeding only in feeling extraordinarily
embarrassed.

He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in
the manner (or what he conceived to be the manner) of a
brilliant young surgeon who is about to operate. He was so
absorbed in looking like a brilliant young surgeon that he was
completely lost, and discovered himself in a wing filled with
private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go on
being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess igno¬
rance by asking directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the
door of a bedroom in which a probationer nurse was scrubbing
the floor.

She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a
harsh blue denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a tur¬
ban bound about her head with an elastic — a uniform as
grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She peered up with the
alert impudence of a squirrel.

“Nurse,” he said, “I want to find Ward D.”

Lazily, “Do you?”

“I do! If I can interrupt your work — ”

“Doesn’t matter. The damn’ superintendent of nurses put
me at scrubbing, and we aren’t ever supposed to scrub floors,
because she caught me smoking a cigarette. She’s an old ter¬
ror. If she found a child like you wandering around here,
she’d drag you out by the ear.”

“My dear young woman, it may interest you to know — ”

“Oh! ‘My dear young woman, it may — ’ Sounds exactly
like our old prof, back home.”

Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as

ARROWSMITH

though they were a pair of children making tongues at each
other in a railroad station, was infuriating to the earnest
young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.

“I am Dr. Arrowsmith,” he snorted, “and I’ve been in¬
formed that even probationers learn that the first duty of a
nurse is to stand when addressing doctors! I wish to find
Ward D, to take a strain of — it may interest you to know! —
a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly direct me — ”

“Oh, gee, I’ve been getting fresh again. I don’t seem to
get along with this military discipline. All right. I’ll stand
up.” She did. Her every movement was swiftly smooth as
the running of a cat. “You go back, turn right, then left.
I’m sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old muffs
of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to — Honestly, Doc¬
tor — if you are a doctor — ”

“I don’t see that I need to convince you!” he raged, as he
stalked off. All the way to Ward D he was furious at her
veiled derision. He was an eminent scientist, and it was out¬
rageous that he should have to endure impudence from a pro¬
bationer — a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin and slangy
young woman apparently from the West. He repeated his
rebuke: “I don’t see that I need to convince you.” He was
proud of himself for having been lofty. He pictured himself
telling Madeline about it, concluding, “I just said to her
quietly, ‘My dear young woman, I don’t know that you are
the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,’ I
said, and she wilted.”

But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern
who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was
before him, provocative, enduring. He had to see her again,
and convince her — “Take a better man than she is, better
man than I’ve ever met, to get away with being insulting to
me!” said the modest young scientist.

He had raced back to her room and they were staring at
each other before it came to him that he had not worked out
the crushing things he was going to say. She had risen from
her scrubbing. She had taken off her turban, and her hair
was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face
childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could
imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a stack of
straw.

“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then.

ARROWSMITH

I was just — Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought
you were awfully nice, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but
you did seem so young for a doctor.”

“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”

“So was I!”

He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a
relation free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with
Madeline. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If
she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she
was full of laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty
too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively,
though his words were only:

“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”

“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired
girl — that’s what we call ’em in Dakota.”

“Come from Dakota?”

“I come from the most enterprising town — three hundred
and sixty-two inhabitants — in the entire state of North Da¬
kota — Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?”

To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed
absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she
by her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its
bagginess obscured her bright hair.

“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But — I don’t know.
I’m not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll
be a bacteriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool
theories of immunology. And I don’t think much of the bed¬
side manner.”

“I’m glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear
some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their
patients — the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs — they
seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you can bluff a bacteria —
what is it? — bacterium?”

“No, they’re — What do they call you?”

“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name — Leora Tozer.”

“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”

Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping
in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who
is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed?
And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as
eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was
the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour

ARROWSMITH

when each found in the other a part of his own self, always
vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They
rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop
operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess.
Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one,
yet taken together they were as wise and important as the
tides or the sounding wind.

He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had
crossed her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an
excellent hockey-player. She told him that she “adored”
vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born
in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn’t
particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal
ambition; she had come here because she liked adventure.
She hinted, with debonair regret, that she was not too popular
with the superintendent of nurses; she meant to be good but
somehow she was always dragged into rebellions connected
with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic
in her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an
impression of gay courage.

He interrupted with an urgent, “When can you get away
from the hospital for dinner? To-night?”

“Why—”

“Please!”

“All right.”

“When can I call for you?”

“Do you think I ought to — Well, seven.”

All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and re¬
joiced. He informed himself that he was a moron to make
this long trip into Zenith twice in one day; he remembered
that he was engaged to a girl called Madeline Fox; he wor¬
ried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that Leora
Tozer was merely an imitation nurse who was as illiterate as
a kitchen wench and as impertinent as a newsboy; he decided,
several times he decided, to telephone her and free himself
from the engagement.

He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.

He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like
that of an undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he
doing here? She’d probably be agonizingly dull, through a
whole long dinner. Would he even recognize her, in mufti?
Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue

ARROWSMITH

uniform was gone ; she was childishly slim and light in a prin¬
cess frock that was a straight line from high collar and soft
young breast to her feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand
under his arm as they left the hospital. She moved beside him
with a little dancing step, shyer now than she had been in the
dignity of her job but looking up at him with confidence.

“Glad I came?” he demanded.

She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking
over obvious questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of
a child, not the ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-
manager) she admitted, “Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you’d
go and get sore at me because I was so fresh, and I wanted
to apologize and — I liked your being so crazy about your
bacteriology. I think I’m a little crazy, too. The interns
here — they come bothering around a lot, but they’re so sort
of — so sort of soggy, with their new stethoscopes and their
brand-new dignity. Oh — ” Most gravely of all: “Oh, gee,
yes, I’m glad you came. . . . Am I an idiot to admit it?”

“You’re a darling to admit it.” He was a little dizzy with
her. He pressed her hand with his arm.

“You won’t think I let every medic and doctor pick me up,
will you?”

“Leora! And you don’t think I try and pick up every
pretty girl I meet? I liked — I felt somehow we two could be
chums. Can’t we? Can’t we?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see. Where are we going for dinner?”

“The Grand Hotel.”

“We are not! It’s terribly expensive. Unless you’re awfully
rich. You aren’t, are you?”

“No, I’m not. Just enough money to get through medic
school. But I want — ”

“Let’s go to the Bijou. It’s a nice place, and it isn’t expen¬
sive.”

He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted
that it would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith’s
most resplendent hotel, but that was the last time he thought
of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He
found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness,
surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She
was feminine but undemanding; she was never Improving and
rarely shocked; she was neither flirtatious nor cold. She was
indeed the first girl to whom he had ever talked without self-

ARROWSMITH

consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had a chance to
say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a
disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old
man who made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter
lilies, to Clif, he was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin
banged the table and quoted his idol: “Up to the present, even
in the work of Ehrlich, most research has been largely a
matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is the
opposite of the scientific method, by which one seeks to estab¬
lish a general law governing a group of phenomena so that he
may predict what will happen.”

He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her,
almost glaring at her. He insisted, “Do you see where he
leaves all these detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buz¬
zing in the manure heap just as much as he does the commer¬
cial docs? Do you get him? Do you?”

“Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for
him. But please don’t bully me so!”

“Was I bullying? I didn’t mean to. Only, when I get to
thinking about the way most of these damned profs don’t
even know what he’s up to — ”

Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether under¬
stand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work
of Arrhenius, yet she listened with comfortable pleasure in his
zeal, with none of Madeline Fox’s gently corrective admoni¬
tions.

She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.

“I’ve talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven’t bored you,”
he blurted.

“I loved it.”

“And I was so technical, and so noisy — Oh, I cm a
chump!”

“I like having you trust me. I’m not ‘earnest,’ and I
haven’t any brains whatever, but I do love it when my men-
folks think I’m intelligent enough to hear what they really
think and — Good night!”

They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in
that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his
honest affianced, Madeline.

He came to know all of Leora’s background. Her bed¬
ridden grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming
so far to take hospital training. The hamlet of Wheatsyl-

ARROWS MITH

vania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-
elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer,
sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the
creamery, and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town;
pious at Wednesday evening prayer-meeting, fussing over
every penny he gave to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her
brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain over his ear,
cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank
owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers
at the United Brethren Church; German Lutheran farmers
singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the Hollanders, the Bohe¬
mians and Poles. And round about the village, the living
wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora,
always an “odd child,” doing obediently enough the flat house¬
hold tasks but keeping snug the belief that some day she
would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or
poverty, she would behold all the colored world.

It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see
her childhood that he cried, “Darling, you don’t have to tell
me about you. I’ve always known you. I’m not going to let
you go, no matter what. You’re going to marry me — ”

They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that
blatant restaurant. Her first words were:

“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know
why. You’re as unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’
means you to me and — Oh, my dear, I do like you!”

Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.

He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.

By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt
like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a
low dog; but he could not bring it off. He thought of Made¬
line’s pathetic enthusiasms: her “Provencal pleasaunce” and
the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she patted with
fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her
pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather
heroes in magazine illustrations. He mourned that he had
sinned against loyalty. But his agitation broke against the
solidity of his union with Leora. Her companionship released
his soul. Even when, as advocate for Madeline, he pleaded

ARROWSMITH

that Leora was a trivial young woman who probably chewed
gum in private and certainly was careless about her nails in
public, her commonness was dear to the commonness that was
in himself, valid as ambition or reverence, an earthy base to
her gaiety as it was to his nervous scientific curiosity.

He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next
day. Gottlieb had twice to ask him whether he had prepared
the new batch of medium, and Gottlieb was an autocrat,
sterner with his favorites than with the ruck of students. He
snarled, “Arrowsmith, you are a moon-calf! My God, am I
to spend my life with Dummkopje? I cannot be always alone,
Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now
you haf not been keen about work.”

Martin went off mumbling, “I love that man!” In his
tangled mood he catalogued Madeline’s pretenses, her nagging,
her selfishness, her fundamental ignorance. He worked him¬
self up to a state of virtue in which it was agreeably clear to
him that he must throw Madeline over, entirely as a rebuke.
He went to her in the evening prepared to blaze out at her
first complaining, to forgive her finally, but to break their
engagement and make life resolutely simple again.

She did not complain.

She ran to him. “Dear, you’re so tired — your eyes look
tired. Have you been working frightfully hard? I’ve been
so sorry you couldn’t come ’round, this week. Dear, you
mustn’t kill yourself. Think of all the years you have ahead
to do splendid things in. No, don’t talk. I want you to rest.
Mother’s gone to the movies. Sit here. See, I’ll make you
so comfy with these pillows. Just lean back — go to sleep if
you want to — and I’ll read you ‘The Crock of Gold.’ You’ll
love it.”

He was determined that he would not love it and, as he
probably had no sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful
whether he appreciated it, but its differentness aroused him.
Though Madeline’s voice was shrill and cornfieldish after
Leora’s lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he was sick
ashamed of his intention to hurt her. He saw that it was
she, with her pretenses, who was the child, and the detached
and fearless Leora who was mature, mistress of a real world.
The reproofs with which he had planned to crush her vanished.

Suddenly she was beside him, begging, “I’ve been so lonely
for you, all week!”

ARROW SMITH

So he was a traitor to both women. It was Leora who had
intolerably roused him; it was really Leora whom he was
caressing now; but it was Madeline who took his hunger to
herself, and when she whimpered, “I’m so glad you’re glad to
be here,” he could say nothing. He wanted to talk about
Leora, to shout about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He
dragged out a few sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he ob¬
served that Madeline was a handsome young woman and a
sound English scholar; and while she gaped with disappoint¬
ment at his lukewarmness, he got himself away, at ten. He
had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like a low
dog.

He hastened to Clif Clawson.

He had told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif ’s
probable scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calm¬
ness with which he came into their room. Clif was sitting on
the small of his back, shoeless feet upon the study table,
reading a Sherlock Holmes story which rested on the powerful
volume of Osier’s Medicine which he considered himself to be
reading.

“Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let’s sneak down to Bar¬
ney’s and see if we can rustle one.”

“Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the
speed behind the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cere¬
bellum and the medulla oblongata.”

“Oh, cut out the cuteness! I’m in a bad temper.”

“Ah, the laddy has been having a scrap with his chaste lil
Madeline! Was she horrid to ickly Martykins? All right.
I’ll quit. Come on. Yoicks for the drink.”

He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all
of them scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way,
and he almost coaxed Martin into cheerfulness. “Barney’s”
was a pool-room, a tobacco shop and, since Mohalis was dry
by local option, an admirable blind-pig. Clif and the hairy-
handed Barney greeted each other in a high and worthy
manner:

“The benisons of eventide to you, Barney. May your cir¬
culation proceed unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal
branch of the ulnar artery, in which connection, comrade,
Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert Arrowsmith and I would fain trifle with
another bottle of that renowned strawberry pop.”

“Gosh, Clif, you cer’nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If

ARROWSMITH

I ever need a’ arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I’ll
come around and let you talk it off. Strawberry pop, gents?”

The front room of Barney’s was an impressionistic painting
in which a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, play¬
ing cards, and pink sporting papers were jumbled in chaos.
The back room was simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored
soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables with broken chairs.
Barney poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two
glasses of powerful and appallingly raw whisky, and Clif and
Martin took them to the table in the corner. The effect was
swift. Martin’s confused sorrows turned to optimism. He
told Clif that he was going to write a book exposing idealism,
but what he meant was that he was going to do something
clever about his dual engagement. He had it! He would
invite Leora and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the
truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and
had another whisky; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow,
and Barney that he was a public benefactor, and unsteadily
he retired to the telephone, which was shut off from public
hearing in a closet.

At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superin¬
tendent, and the night superintendent was a man frosty and
suspicious. “This is no time to be calling up a probationer!
Half-past eleven! Who are you, anyway?”

Martin checked the “I’ll damn’ soon tell you who I am!”
which was his natural reaction, and explained that he was
speaking for Leora’s invalid grand-aunt, that the poor old lady
was very low, and if the night superintendent cared to take
upon himself the murder of a blameless gentlewoman —

When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and
soberly now, feeling as though he had come from the menace
of thronging strangers into the security of her presence:

“Leora? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby to-morrow, twelve-
thirty. Must! Important! Fix ’t somehow — your aunt’s
sick.”

“All right, dear. G’ night,” was all she said.

It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline’s
flat, then Mrs. Fox’s voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:

“Yes, yes?”

“ ’S Martin.”

“Who is it? Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the
Fox apartment?”

ARRO WSMITH

“Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it’s Martin Arrowsmith speaking.”

“Oh, oh, my dear! The ’phone woke me out of a sound
sleep, and I couldn’t make out what you were saying. I was
so frightened. I thought maybe it was a telegram or some¬
thing. I thought perhaps something had happened to Maddy’s
brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing’s hap¬
pened!”

Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old
woman bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost
all his whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and
in a melancholy way, with all the weight of life again upon
him, he sighed that no, nothing had happened, but he’d for¬
gotten to tell Madeline something — so shor — so sorry call so
late — could he speak Mad just minute —

Then Madeline was bubbling, “Why, Marty dear, what is
it? I do hope nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just
left here — ”

“Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There’s a— there’s a
great friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet—”

“Who is he?”

“You’ll see to-morrow. Listen, I want you come m. and
meet — come meet um at lunch. Going,” with ponderous jocu-
larity, “going to blow you all to a swell feed at the Grand

“Oh, how nice!”

« _ so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty inter-

urban, at College Square. Can you?”

Vaguely, “Oh, I’d love to but— I have an eleven o clock,
and I don’t like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go
shopping with her— she’s looking for some kind of shoes that
you can wear with her pink crepe de chine but that you can
walk in— and we sort of thought maybe we might lunch at
Ye Kollege Karavanserai— and I’d half planned to go to the
movies with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska
film is simply dandy, she saw it to-night, and I thought I
might go see it before they take it off, though Heaven knows
I ought to come right home and study and not go anywhere

3,t all _

“Now listen! It’s important. Don’t you trust me? Will

you come or not?” .

“Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, 1 11 try to be

there. The eleven-forty?”

“Yes.”

ARROWSMITH

“At College Square? Or at Bluthman’s Book Shop?”

“At College Square l”

Her gentle “I trust you” and her wambling “I’ll try to”
were warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating
cell and returned to Clif.

“What’s the grief?” Clif wondered. “Wife passed away?
Or did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-
boy-to-night looks like a necropsy. Slip him another straw¬
berry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a
physician.”

“Oh, shut up,” was all Martin had to say, and that without
conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little
brightnesses; he had praised Clif’s pool -playing and called
Barney “old Cimex lectularius” ; but now, while the affec¬
tionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save when he
grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), “If you knew all
the troubles I have — all the doggone mess a fellow can get
into — you’d feel down in the mouth!”

Clif was alarmed. “Look here, old socks. If you’ve gotten
in debt, I’ll raise the cash, somehow. If it’s — Been going
a little too far with Madeline?”

“You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not
worthy to touch Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing
but respect.”

“The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh,
wish there was something I could do for you. Oh! Have
’nother shot! Barney! Come a-runnin’!”

By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy careless¬
ness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had de¬
sired to fight three large academic sophomores. But in the
morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that
he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.

His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a
visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had
not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole
grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While
he was practising the tactful observation he was going to
present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy
thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her

ARROW SMITH

attention from the “great friend of his” whom they were
to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Bar¬
ney’s; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and
when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the
evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once
relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.

“Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so
mysterious about? Oh, Martykins, is it a joke? Aren’t we
going to meet anybody? Did you just want to run away
from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand to¬
gether? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the
Grand. Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but stilly
it is impressive, and — Did I guess it, darling?”

“No, there’s some one — Oh, we’re going to meet some¬
body, all right!”

“Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart,
you make me impatient.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”

“Oh!”

“It’s — You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and
some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully help¬
ful.” He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture
of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he
should go on trying to resist his punishment. “Especially
there’s one nurse there who’s a wonder. She’s learned so
much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot
of good stunts, and she seems like a nice girl — -Miss Tozer, her
name is — I think her first name is Lee or something like that —
and she’s so — her father is one of the big men in North Da¬
kota — awfully rich — big banker — I guess she just took up
nursing to do her share in the world’s work.” He had achieved
Madeline’s own tone of poetic uplift. “I thought you two
might like to know each other. You remember you were say¬
ing how few girls there are in Mohalis that really appreciate —
appreciate ideals.”

“Ye-es.” Madeline gazed at something far away and, what¬
ever it was, she did not like it. “I shall be ver’ pleased to
meet her, of course. Any friend of yours — Oh, Mart! I do
hope you don’t flirt; I hope you don’t get too friendly with
all these nurses. I don’t know anything about it, of course,
but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular man-
hunters.”

ARROWSMITH

“Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn’t!”

“No, I’m sure, but — Oh, Martykins, you won’t be silly
and let these nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean,
for your own sake. They have such an advantage. Poor
Madeline, she wouldn’t be allowed to go hanging around men’s
rooms learning — things, and you think you’re so psychological,
Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around
her finger.”

“Well, I guess I can take care of myself!”

“Oh, I mean — I don’t mean — But I do hope this Tozer
person — I’m sure I shall like her, if you do, but — I am
your own true love, aren’t I, always!”

She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his
hand. She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflec¬
tions on Leora turned into misery. Incidentally, her thumb
was gouging painfully into the back of his hand. He tried to
look tender as he protested, “Sure — sure — gosh, honest, Mad,
look out. That old duffer across the aisle is staring at us.”

For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was ade¬
quately punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.

The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was
compared by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the
Palmer House, the West Hotel. It has been humbled since by
the supercilious modesty of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty
now is its tessellated floor and all the wild gilt tarnished, and
in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes
and horse-dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn be¬
tween Chicago and Pittsburg; an oriental palace, the entrance
a score of brick Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a
black and white marble floor, up past gilt iron balconies, to
the green, pink, pearl, and amber skylight seven stories above.

They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch
built round a pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting.
Martin perceived that Leora was unusually sloppy — his own
word. It did not matter to him how clumsily her honey-
colored hair was tucked under her black hat, a characterless
little mushroom of a hat, but he did see and resent the con-
. trast between her shirtwaist, with the third button missing,
her checked skirt, her unfortunate bright brown bolero jacket,
and Madeline’s sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was
not toward Leora. Scanning them together (not haughtily, as
the choosing and lofty male, but anxiously) he was more irri-

ARROWSMITH

tated than ever by Madeline. That she should be better
dressed was an affront. His affection flew to guard Leora, to
wrap and protect her.

And all the while he was bumbling:

“ — thought you two girls ought know each other — Miss Fox,
want t’ make you ’quainted with Miss Tozer — little celebra¬
tion — lucky dog have two Queens of Sheba — ”

And to himself, “Oh, hell!”

While they murmured nothing in particular to each other
he herded them into the famous dining-room of the Grand.
It was full of gilt chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silver¬
ware, and aged negro retainers with gold and green waist¬
coats. Round the walls ran select views of Pompeii, Venice,
Lake Como, and Versailles.

“Swell room!” chirped Leora.

Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the
same thing in longer words, but she considered the frescoes
all over again and explained, “Well, it’s very large — ”

He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four
dollars for the orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard
of good food was that he must spend every cent of the four
dollars. While he wondered what “Puree St. Germain” could
be, and the waiter hideously stood watching behind his
shoulder, Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying po¬
liteness:

“Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss — Tozer.”

“Yes, sort of.”

“Do you find it interesting?”

“Well — yes — yes, I think it’s interesting.”

“I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering. Of
course my work — I’m taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English—” She made it sound as though she were taking
her earldom — “it’s rather dry and detached. I have to master
the growth of the language and so on and so forth. With
your practical training, I suppose you’d find that rather
stupid.”

“Yes, it must be — no, it must be very interesting.”

“Do you come from Zenith, Miss — Tozer?”

“No, I come from — Just a little town. Well, hardly a
town. . . . North Dakota.”

“Oh! North Dakota!”

“Yes. . . . Way West.”

ARROWSMITH

“Oh, yes. . . . Are you staying East for some time?” It
was precisely what a much-resented New York cousin had
once said to Madeline.

“Well, I don’t — Yes, I guess I may be here quite some
time.”

“Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?”

“Oh, yes, it’s pretty nice. These big cities — So much to
see.”

“ ‘Big’? Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of
view, doesn’t it? I always think of New York as big but —
Of course — Do you find the contrast to North Dakota inter¬
esting?”

“Well, of course it’s different.”

“Tell me what North Dakota’s like. I’ve always wondered
about these Western states.” It was Madeline’s second
plagiarism of her cousin. “What is the general impression it
makes on you?”

“I don’t think I know just how you mean.”

“I mean what is the general effect? The — impression ”

“Well, it’s got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes.”

“But I mean— I suppose you’re all terribly virile and
energetic, compared with us Easterners.”

“I don’t — Well, yes, maybe.”

“Have you met lots of people in Zenith?”

“Not so awjully many.”

“Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hos¬
pital? He’s such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon
but frightfully talented. He sings won-derfully, and he comes
from the most frightfully nice family.”

“No, I don’t think I’ve met him yet,” Leora bleated.

“Oh, you must. And he plays the slickest — the most gor¬
geous game of tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire
parties on Royal Ridge. Frightfully smart.”

Martin now first interrupted. “Smart? Him? He hasn’t
got any brains whatever.”

“My dear child, I didn’t mean ‘smart’ in that sense!” He
sat alone and helpless while she again turned on Leora and
ever more brightly inquired whether Leora knew this son of a
corporation lawyer and that famous debutante, this hat-
shop and that club. She spoke familiarly of what were
known as the Leaders of Zenith Society, the personages who
appeared daily in the society columns of the Advocate-Times,

ARROWS MITH

the Cowxes and Van Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was
astonished by the familiarity; he remembered that she had
once gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had not known
that she was so intimate with the peerage. Certainly Leora
had appallingly never heard of these great ones, nor ever at¬
tended the concerts, the lectures, the recitals at which Made¬
line apparently spent all her glittering evenings.

Madeline shrugged a little, then, “Well — Of course with
the fascinating doctors and everybody that you meet in the
hospital, I suppose you’d find lectures frightfully tame.
Well — ” She dismissed Leora and looked patronizingly at
Martin. “Are you planning some more work on the what-is-it
with rabbits?”

He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly.
“Madeline! Brought you two together because — Don’t
know whether you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you
could, because I’ve — I’m not making any excuses for myself.
I couldn’t help it. I’m engaged to both of you, and I want
to know — ”

Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so
proud and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, word¬
less. She came back, she touched Leora’s shoulder, and
quietly kissed her. “Dear, I’m sorry for you. You’ve got a
job! You poor baby!” She strode away, her shoulders
straight.

Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.

He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling,
easy, a little mocking. “Sandy, I warn you that I’m never
going to give you up. I suppose you’re as bad as She says;
I suppose I’m foolish — I’m a hussy. But you’re mine! I
warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged to some¬
body else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so
well of yourself! I guess you’re pretty selfish. But I don’t
care. You’re mine!”

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their common¬
ness.

She pondered, “I do feel we’re nearer together than you
and Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully
me — because I tag after you and She never would. And I
know your work is more important to you than I am, maybe
more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary
and She isn’t. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows

ARROWSMITH

why, but I do), while She has sense enough to make you ad¬
mire Her and tag after Her.”

“No! I swear it isn’t because I can bully you, Leora —
I swear it isn’t — I don’t think it is. Dearest, don’t, don’t
think she’s brighter than you are. She’s glib but — Oh, let’s
stop talking! I’ve found you! My life’s begun!”

CHAPTER VII

The difference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to
Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene
comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended
on each other’s loyalty and liking, and certain things in his
existence wrere settled forever. Yet his absorption in her was
not stagnant. He was always making discoveries about the
observations of life which she kept incubating in her secret
little head while she made smoke rings with her cigarettes
and smiled silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred
him, and with gay frank passion she answered him; but to
another, sexless Leora he talked more honestly than to Gott¬
lieb or his own worried self, while with her boyish nod or
an occasional word she encouraged him to confidence in his
evolving ambition and disdains.

Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was under¬
stood among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmo¬
politan was the University of Winnemac becoming that they
were expected to wear the symbols of respectability known as
“dress-suits.” On the solitary and nervous occasion when
Martin had worn evening clothes he had rented them from
the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he
was going to introduce Leora to the world as his pride and
flowering. Like two little old people, absorbed in each other
and diffidently exploring new, unwelcoming streets of the city
where their alienated children live, Martin and Leora edged
into the garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley and
Koch’s, the loftiest department store in Zenith. She was in¬
timidated by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass,
by the opera hats and lustrous mufflers and creamy riding
breeches. When he had tried on a dinner suit and come out
for her approval, his long brown tie and soft-collared shirt

7 1

ARROWSMITH

somewhat rustic behind the low evening waistcoat, and when
the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:

“Darn it, Sandy, you’re too grand for me. I just simply
can’t get myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you’re going
to go and look so spiffy I won’t have a chance with you.”

He almost kissed her.

The clerk, returning, warbled, “I think, Modom, you’ll find
that your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing
collars.”

Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she
sighed:

“Oh, gee, you’re one of these people that get ahead. I never
thought I’d have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a
come-to-Heaven collar. Oh, well, I’ll tag!”

For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was ex¬
tremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting,
spotty with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and
wooden scalpels ten feet long.

In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a
score of dances, though the refined titillations of communal
embracing were the chief delight of the co-educational uni¬
versity. When he arrived at the Armory, with Leora timor¬
ously brave in a blue crepe de chine made in no recognized
style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step, though
he did achingly desire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora,
admire her and make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to
introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to
dance with her. They stood alone, under the balcony, discon¬
solately facing the vastness of the floor, while beyond them
flashed the current of dancers, beautiful, formidable, desirable.
Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair,
dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as stated
in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents’
Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of volup¬
tuous white waistcoats, and when that embryo famous sur¬
geon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and
pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most
superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt him¬
self a hobbledehoy.

ARROW SMITH

“Come on, we’ll dance,” he said, as though it were a defiance
to all Angus Duers.

He very much wanted to go home.

He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and
himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in
his arms. He could not believe that she was in his arms.
As they revolved ne saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls
and distinguished-looking women about the great Dr. Silva,
dean of the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at
home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swing¬
ing, deft. Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remem¬
bered that yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary
society of Sigma Xi.

Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the bal¬
cony where they had stood before, to their den, their one
safe refuge. While he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to
his new clothes, he was cursing the men he saw go by laugh¬
ing with girls, ignoring his Leora.

“Not many here yet,” he fussed. “Pretty soon they’ll all
be coming, and then you’ll have lots of dances.”

“Oh, I don’t mind.”

(“God, won’t somebody come and ask the poor kid?”)

He fretted over his lack of popularity among the dancing-
men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were
present — Clif liked any sort of assembly, but he could not
afford dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing as at sight of the best-
beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of professional
normality, wandering toward them, but Watters passed by,
merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and
now all his pride was gor/3. If Leora could be happy —

“I wouldn’t care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in
the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything
to let her have a good time! If I could coax Duer over —
No, that’s one thing I couldn’t stand: crawling to that dirty
snob — I will!”

Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived. Martin pounced on
him lovingly. “H’lo, old Fat! You a stag to-night? Meet
my friend Miss Tozer.”

Fatty’s bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora’s cheeks and
amber hair. He heaved, “Pleasedmeetch — dance starting —
have the honor?” in so flattering a manner that Martin could
have kissed him.

ARROWSMITH

That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur
to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt
gorgeously unselfish. . . . That various girl wallflowers were
sitting near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him
either.

He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of
Digams, one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter
she had more invitations than she could take. Martin’s ex¬
citement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung too closely
to her partners, that she followed their steps too eagerly.
After the fifth dance he was agitated. “Course! She’s en¬
joying herself! Hasn’t got time to notice that I just
stand here — yes, by thunder, and hold her scarf! Sure! Fine
for her. Fact I might like a little dancing myself — And
the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan,
the — the — the damnedest — Oh, you and I are going to have
a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her
off me — the one thing I’ve ever loved! Just because they dance
better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness — And that
damn’ orchestra playing that damn’ peppery music — And she
falling for all their damn’ cheap compliments and — You and
I are going to have one lovely little understanding!”

When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering
medics, he muttered to her, “Oh, it doesn’t matter about me!”

“Would you like this one? Course you shall have it!” She
turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline’s sense of
having to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained
eternity of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor,
the size of the room, and her “dandy partners.” At the sound
of the music he held out his arms.

“No,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She led him to
a corner and hurled at him, “Sandy, this is the last time I’m
going to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See
here! If we’re going to stick together — and we are! — I’m
going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and I’m
going to be just as foolish with ’em as I want to. Dinners
and those things — I suppose I’ll always go on being a clam.
Nothing to say. But I love dancing, and I’m going to do
exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense whatever,
you’d know I don’t care a hang for anybody but you. Yours!
Absolute. No matter what fool things you do — and they’ll

ARR OWSMITH

probably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me
again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren’t you ashamed
of yourself!”

“I wasn’t jealous — Yes, I was. Oh, I can’t help it! I
love you so much. I’d be one fine lover, now wouldn’t I, if
I never got jealous!”

“All right. Only you’ve got to keep it under cover. Now
we’ll finish the dance.”

He was her slave.

It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac,
to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded
into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight,
but to-night it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of
almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another hu¬
morous student, with a napkin over his arm, pretended to be
a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked
a cigarette.

At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora.
He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel
shirt.

Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of
Martin’s friends must be brought for judgment. He had not
met Leora. Martin had confessed his double engagement; he
had explained that Leora was unquestionably the most gra¬
cious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used
up all of his laudatory adjectives and all of Clif’s patience on
the subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to
dislike Leora as another siren of morality.

He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at
Martin, behind her back, “Good-looking kid, I will say that
for her — what’s wrong with her?” When they had brought
their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the
long counter, Clif rasped:

“Well, it’s grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to
assassinate wdth me ’mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sas-
siety. Gosh, it’s fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of
an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and
merely play a low game of poker — in which Father deftly re-

ARROWSMITH

moved the sum of six simolea, point ten, from the foregathered
bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins
here have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo and,
uh, Monte Carlo and so on.”

She had an immense power of accepting people as they were.
While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside
of a chicken sandwich and assented, “Um-huh.”

“Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that ‘If you
are a roughneck, I don’t see why you think you’ve got to
boast about it’ stuff that Mart springs on me!”

Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet com¬
panion. . . . Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex -mechanic, he had
so little money yet so scratching a desire to be resplendent
that he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offen¬
sive. Now, when Leora seemed to look through his boasting,
he liked her as quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with
gaiety. Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind,
including Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a
table with Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan,
Martin sprang up, raced down the room. Holding out his
hand he clamored:

“Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma
Xi. That’s fine.”

Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an
instrument which he had seen before but whose use he could
not quite remember. He picked it up and shook it tentatively.
He did not turn his back; he was worse than rude — he looked
patient.

“Well, good luck,” said Martin, chilled and shaky.

“Very good of you. Thanks.”

Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident
as a cosmic tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to
be shot. In the midst of it Duer came past, trailing after
Dean Silva’s party, and nodded to Martin, who glared back,
feeling noble and mature.

At parting, Clif held Leora’s hand and urged, “Honey, I
think a lot of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid
was going to get tied up to — to parties that would turn him
into a hand-shaker. I’m a hand-shaker myself. I know less
about medicine than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob has
some conscience to him, and I’m so darn’ glad he’s playing
around with a girl that’s real folks and — Oh, listen at me

ARROWSMITH

failin’ all over my clumsy feet! But I just mean I hope you
won’t mind Uncle Clif saying he does by golly like you a
lot!”

It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora
home and sagged into bed. He could not sleep. T he aloof¬
ness of Angus Duer racked him as an insult to himself, as
somehow an implied insult to Leora, but his boyish rage had
passed into a bleaker worry. Didn’t Duer, for all his snob¬
bishness and shallowness, have something that he himself
lacked? Didn’t Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his speech
of a vaudeville farmer, his suspicion of fine manners as posing,
take life too easily? Didn’t Duer know how to control and
drive his hard little mind? Wasn’t there a technique of man¬
ners as there was of experimentation. . . . Gottlieb’s fluent
bench-technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira
Hinkley. ... Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding
to Duer’s own affected standard?

He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes
of fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had
said or heard that night, till round his twisting body there
was fevered shouting.

As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came
unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guilti¬
ness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has
borrowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically
he began to blurt “Hello,” but he checked it in a croak,
scowled, and stumbled on.

“Oh, Mart,” Angus called. He was dismayingly even. Re¬
member speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I
was going out that you looked huffy. I was wondering if you
thought I’d been rude. I’m sorry if you did. Fact is, I had
a rotten headache. Look. I’ve got four tickets ior As t
Listeth,’ in Zenith, next Friday evening— original New York
cast! Like to see it? And I noticed you were with a peach,

at the dance. Suppose she might like to go along with us, she

and some friend of hers?” . .

“Why — gosh — I’ll ’phone her — darn’ nice of you to ask

us _ ”

It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted

ARROWSMITH

and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named
Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:

“Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

“Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?

“Why didn’t he ask Dad Silva’s daughter to go with us?
Does he think Leora is some tart I’ve picked up?

“Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody — wants to
keep us all friendly, so we’ll send him surgical patients some
day when we’re hick G. P.’s and he’s a Great and Only.

“Why did I crawl down so meekly?

“I don’t care! If Leora enjoys it — Me personally, I don’t
care two hoots for all this trotting around — Though of
course it isn’t so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and
be dressed as good as anybody — Oh, I don’t know!”

In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance
of a play “with the original New York cast” was an event.
(What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth
Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses
on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods
— graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and
bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate,
virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York — who with their shrill
and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers
pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in
Town Topics.

Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero
when he refused the governorship ; Martin worried because the
heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave
an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen
more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set de¬
picting “Jack Vanduzen’s Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset,
the Next Day” was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was
going to give them supper and that was all there was to it.
Miss Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by
a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, “Oh, I don’t care.
I’ll slip in through a window. If you’re there in the morning,
the Old Cat can’t prove you got in late.” Shaking her head
at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while

ARROWSMITH

Leora, Angus, and Martin strolled to Epstein’s Alt Nurem¬
berg Cafe for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the
sight of German drinking mottos and papier-mache armor.

Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin,
watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man
should make a comrade of a girl who could not bring him
social advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl
passion between Martin and Leora could exist, was probably
inconceivable to him. He decided that she was conveniently
frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set him¬
self to acquiring her for his own uses.

“I hope you enjoyed the play,” he condescended to her.

“Oh, yes—”

“Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls
fall for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like
me, I have to go on working without a single person to give
me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women.”

With unexpected defiance from Leora: “When anybody says
that, it means they’re not shy, and they despise women.”

“Despise them? W"hy, child, honestly, I long to be a Don
Juan. But I don’t know how. Won’t you give me a lesson?”
Angus’s aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concen¬
trated on Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting
a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and then to say,
“Don’t be jealous, idiot. I’m magnificently uninterested in
this conceited hypnotist.” But she was flustered by Angus’s
sleek assurance, by his homage to her eyes and wit and reti¬
cence.

Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must
be going — Leora really had to be back — The trolleys ran
infrequently after midnight and they walked to the hospital
through hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept
up a high-strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them,
silent, sulky, proud of being sulky. Skittering through a
garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith General Hos¬
pital, a block long, five stories of bleak windows with infre¬
quent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first
floor was but five feet from the ground, and they lifted Leora
up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window.
She slid in, whispering, “G’ night! Thanks!”

Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a
chill mournful ness. A light was suddenly flickering in a win-

ARRO WSMITH

dow above them, and there was a woman’s scream breaking
down into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting — that in the
briefness of life he should lose one moment of her living pres¬
ence.

“I’m going in after her; see she gets there safe,” he said.

The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted,
thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead
of him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric
globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran
after her, on his toes. She squeaked as he caught her arm.

“We got to say good-night better than that!” he grumbled.
“With that damn’ Duer — ”

“Ssssssh! They’d simply murder me if they caught you
here. Do you want to get me fired?”

“Would you care, if it was because of me?”

“Yes — no — well — But they’d probably fire you from medic
school, my lad. If — ” His caressing hands could feel her
shiver with anxiety. She peered along the corridor, and his
quickened imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering
from doorways. She sighed, then, resolutely: “We can’t talk
here. We’ll slip up to my room — roommate’s away for the
week. Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody in sight up¬
stairs, I’ll come back.”

He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then
breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by
this cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from
home and softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with
hand against his chest she forbade him, as she mourned:

“You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so?
With that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn’t have
a chance! Likes himself too well. And then you jealous!”

“I wasn’t — Yes, I was, but I don’t care! To have to sit
there and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I
wanted to talk to you, to kiss you! All right! Probably I’ll
always be jealous. It’s you that have got to trust me. I’m
not easy-going; never will be. Oh, trust me — ”

Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in
memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that
the superintendent of nurses might dreadfully come bursting
in; they forgot that Angus was waiting. “Oh, curse Angus —
let him go home!” was Martin’s only reflection, as his eyes
closed and his long loneliness vanished.

ARRO WSM ITH

“Good night, dear love — my love forever,” he exulted.

In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought
of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from
the window he discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps,
asleep. As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped
short. He saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man, vaguely
in a porter’s uniform, who was shouting:

“I’ve caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and
we’ll find out what you’ve been up to!”

They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman’s clasp
he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of
unbathed flesh. Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder
of red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started
to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its contrast to the aching
sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watch¬
man, raging.

From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him,
there was a thin sound of disgust. “Oh, come on! Let’s get
out of this. Why do you dirty your hands on scum like him?”

The watchman bellowed, “Oh, I’m scum, am I? I’ll show
you!”

He collared Angus and slapped him.

Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad.
It was not the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watch¬
man; it was a killer, and his eyes were the terrible eyes of the
killer, speaking to the least experienced a message of death.
He gasped only, “He dared to touch me!” A pen-knife was
somehow in his hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and he
was busily and earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.

As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding
of a policeman’s night stick on the pavement. Martin was
slim but he had pitched hay and strung telephone wire. He
hit the watchman, judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched
Angus’s wrist, and dragged him away. They ran up an alley,
across a courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an owl
trolley glowed and rattled round the corner; they ran beside
it, swung up on the steps, and were safe. T

Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing. My God; 1
wish I’d killed him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin!
Hold me here on the car. I thought I’d got over that. . Once
when I was a kid I tried to kill a fellow— God, I wish I d
cut that filthy swine’s throat!”

ARRO WSMITH

As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin
coaxed, “There’s an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where
we can get some white mule. Come on. It’ll straighten you
up.”

Angus was shaky and stumbling — Angus the punctilious.
Martin led him into the lunch-room where, between catsup
bottles, they had raw whisky in granite-like coffee cups. Angus
leaned his head on his arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till
he had drunk himself into obliteration, and Martin steered
him home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with Clif
snoring, the evening became incredible and nothing more in¬
credible than Angus Duer. “Well, he’ll be a good friend of
mine now, for always. Fine!”

Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw
Angus and rushed toward him. Angus snapped, “You were
frightfully stewed last night, Arrowsmith. If you can’t handle
your liquor better than that, you better cut it out entirely.”

He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.

CHAPTER VIII

And always Martin’s work went on — assisting Max Gottlieb,
instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hos¬
pital demonstrations — sixteen merciless hours to the day. He
stole occasional evenings for original research or for peering
into the stirring worlds of French and German bacteriological
publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb’s
cottage where, against rain-smeared brown wall-paper, were
Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the rest
was nerve-gnawing.

Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; al¬
ways a few pages more than he could drudge through before
he fell asleep at his rickety study-table.

Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind
was burnt raw.

Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among
stumbling students barked at by tired clinical professors.

The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which
Angus Duer lorded it with impatient perfection.

Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H.
Silva, known as “Dad” Silva, who was also dean of the medi¬
cal faculty. He was a round little man with a little crescent of
mustache. Silva’s god was Sir William Osier, his religion was
the art of sympathetic healing, and his patriotism was ac¬
curate physical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of Elk
Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin’s
reverence for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detesta¬
tion for Dr. Roscoe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.

Roscoe Geake was a pedler. He would have done well with
oil stock. As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had
been placed in the human organism for the purpose of provid¬
ing specialists with closed motors. A physician who left the
tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly over¬
looking his future health and comfort — the physician’s future
health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasal

ARROWSMITH

septum was that it never hurt any patient to have part of it
removed, and if the most hopeful examination could find noth¬
ing the matter with the patient’s nose and throat except that
he was smoking too much, still, in any case, the enforced rest
after an operation was good for him. Geake denounced this
cant about Letting Nature Alone. Why, the average well-to-
do man appreciated attention! He really didn’t think much of
his specialists unless he was operated on now and then— just
a little and not very painfully. Geake had one classic annual
address in which, winging far above otolaryngology, he evalu¬
ated all medicine, and explained to grateful healers like Irving
Watters the method of getting suitable fees:

“Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but
it’s no good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you
must first impress your personality on the people who have
the dollars. Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you
must always use salesmanship on him. Explain to him, also
to his stricken and anxious family, the hard work and thought
you are giving to his case, and so make him feel that the
good you have done him, or intend to do him, is even greater
than the fee you plan to charge. Then, when he gets your
bill, he will not misunderstand or kick.”

There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness
of the mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man,
and rather shrill. He had no uplifted moments when he saw
himself in relation to the whole world — if indeed he realized
that there was a deal of the world besides himself. His friend
Clif was boorish, his beloved Leora was rustic, however gal¬
lant she might be, and he himself wasted energy in hectic
busyness and in astonishment at dullness. But if he had not
ripened, yet he was close to earth, he did hate pretentious¬
ness, he did use his hands, and he did seek iron actualities
with a curiosity inextinguishable.

And at infrequent times he perceived the comedy of life;
relaxed for a gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his
admirers. Such was the hour before Christmas vacation when
Roscoe Geake rose to glory.

It was announced in the Winnemac Daily News that Dr.
Geake had been called from the chair of otolaryngology to the

ARROWS MITH

vice-presidency of the puissant New Idea Medical Instrument
and Furniture Company of Jersey City. In celebration he gave
a final address to the entire medical school on “The Art and
Science of Furnishing the Doctor’s Office.”

He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and
enthusiastic and fond of people. He beamed on his loving
students and cried:

“Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those
splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm,
through winter’s chill blast and August’s untempered heat, go
bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world’s humblest,
yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently settle down in
a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leav¬
ing this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want
to ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to
practise medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and
Gray, but also, as a preparation for being that which all
good citizens must be, namely, practical men, a most valuable
little manual of modern psychology, ‘How to Put Pep in Sales¬
manship,’ by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don’t forget, gentle¬
men, and this is my last message to you, the man worth
while is not merely the man who takes things with a smile
but also the man who’s trained in philosophy, practical philoso¬
phy, so that instead of day-dreaming and spending all his time
talking about ‘ethics,’ splendid though they are, and ‘charity,’
glorious virtue though that be, yet he never forgets that un¬
fortunately the world judges a man by the amount of good
hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University
of Hard Knocks judge a physician as they judge a business
man, not merely by his alleged ‘high ideals’ but by the horse¬
power he puts into carrying them out — and making them pay!
And from a scientific standpoint, don’t overlook the fact that
the impression of properly remunerated competence which you
make on a patient is of just as much importance, in these
days of the new psychology, as the drugs you get into him or
the operations he lets you get away with. The minute he
begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward your
skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so
to get well.

“Nothing is more important in inspiring him than to have
such an office that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun
to sell him the idea of being properly cured. I don’t care

ARROWS MITH

whether a doctor has studied in Germany, Munich, Baltimore,
and Rochester. I don’t care whether he has all science at his
finger-tips, whether he can instantly diagnose with a consider¬
able degree of accuracy the most obscure ailment, whether
he has the surgical technique of a Mayo, a Crile, a Blake, an
Ochsner, a Cushing. If he has a dirty old office, with hand-
me-down chairs and a lot of second-hand magazines, then the
patient isn’t going to have confidence in him; he is going
to resist the treatment — and the doctor is going to have diffi¬
culty in putting over and collecting an adequate fee.

“To go far below the surface of this matter into the funda¬
mental philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the
doctor, there are to-day two warring schools, the Tapestry
School and the Aseptic School, if I may venture to so de¬
nominate and conveniently distinguish them. Both of them
have their merits. The Tapestry School claims that luxurious
chairs for waiting patients, handsome hand-painted pictures,
a bookcase jammed with the world’s best literature in expen¬
sively bound sets, together with cut-glass vases and potted
palms, produce an impression of that opulence which can
come only from sheer ability and knowledge. The Aseptic
School, on the other hand, maintains that what the patient
wants is that appearance of scrupulous hygiene which can be
produced only by furnishing the outer waiting-room as well as
the inner offices in white-painted chairs and tables, with merely
a Japanese print against a gray wall.

“But, gentlemen, it seems obvious to me, so obvious that I
wonder it has not been brought out before, that the ideal re¬
ception-room is a combination of these two schools! Have
your potted palms and handsome pictures — to the practical
physician they are as necessary a part of his working equip¬
ment as a sterilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possi¬
ble have everything in sanitary-looking white — and think of
the color-schemes you can evolve, or the good wife for you,
if she be one blessed with artistic tastes! Rich golden or red
cushions, in a Moiris chair enameled the purest white! A
floor-covering of white enamel, with just a border of delicate
rose! Recent and unspotted numbers of expensive maga¬
zines, with art covers, lying on a white table! Gentlemen,
there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to
leave with you; there is the gospel which I hope to spread in

ARROWS MITH

my fresh field of endeavor, the New Ideal Instrument Com¬
pany of Jersey City, where at any time I shall be glad to see
and shake by the hand any and all of you.”

Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin
had an intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned
home to Dakota, perhaps for months, on the ground that her
mother was unwell, and he had, or thought he had, to see her
daily. He must have slept less than four hours a night.
Grinding at examinations on the interurban car, he dashed in
to her, looking up to scowl when he thought of the lively interns
and the men patients whom she met in the hospital, scorning
himself for being so primitive, and worrying all over again.
To see her at all, he had to wait for hours in the lobby, or
walk up and down in the snow outside till she could slip to
a window and peep out. When they were together, they were
completely absorbed. She had a genius for frank passion; she
teased him, tantalized him, but she was tender and unafraid.

He was sick lonely when he saw her off at the Union Station.

His examination papers were competent but, save in bac¬
teriology and internal medicine, they were sketchy. He turned
emptily to the laboratory for vacation time.

He had so far displayed more emotion than achievement in
his tiny original researches. Gottlieb was patient. “It iss a
fine system, this education. All what we cram into the stu¬
dents, not Koch and twTo dieners could learn. Do not worry
about the research. We shall do it yet.” But he expected
Martin to perform a miracle or two in the whole fortnight of
the holidays and Martin had no stomach with which to think.
He played in the laboratory ; he spent his time polishing glass¬
ware, and when he transplanted cultures from his rabbits, his
notes were incomplete.

Gottlieb was instantly grim. “Wass giebt es dann? Do
you call these notes? Always when I praise a man must he
stop working? Do you think that you are a Theobald Smith
or a Novy that you should sit and meditate? You have the
ability of Pfaff!”

For once, Martin was impenitent. He mumbled to him¬
self, as Gottlieb stamped out like a Grand Duke, “Rats, I’ve

ARROWSMITH

got some rest coming to me. Gosh, most fellows, why, they go
to swell homes for vacation, and have dances and fathers and
everything. If Leora was here, we’d go to a show to-night.”

He viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object),
sought Clif Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleep¬
ing between poker games at Barney’s, and outlined a project
of going into town and getting drunk. It was executed so suc¬
cessfully that during vacation it was repeated whenever he
thought of the coming torture-wheel of uninspiring work, when¬
ever he realized that it was only Gottlieb and Leora who held
him here. After vacation, in late January, he found that
whisky relieved him from the frenzy ofwork, from the terror
of loneliness — then betrayed him and left him the more weary,
the more lonely. He felt suddenly old; he was twenty-four
now, he reminded himself, and a schoolboy, his real work not
even begun. Clif was his refuge; Clif admired Leora and
would listen to his babbling of her.

But Cliff and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder’s
Day.

January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton
Stonedge, founder of the medical department of Winnemac,
was annually celebrated by a banquet rich in fraternalism and
speeches and large lack of wine. All the faculty reserved their
soundest observations for the event, and all the students were
expected to be present.

This year it was held in the large hall of the University
Y. M. C. A., a moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits
of whiskered alumni who had gone out to be missionaries, and
long thin pine boxes intended to resemble exposed oak beams.
About the famous guests — Dr. Rouncefield the Chicago sur¬
geon, a diabetes specialist from Omaha, a Pittsburg internist —
stood massed the faculty members. They tried to look festal,
but they were worn and nervous after four months of school.
They had wrinkles and tired eyes. They were all in busi¬
ness suits, mostly impressed. They sounded scientific
and interested; they used words like phlebarteriectasia
and hepatocholangio-enterostomy, and they asked the guests,
“So you just been in Rochester? What’s, uh, what’re Charley
and Will doing in orthopedics?” But they were full of hun-

ARROWSMITH 89

ger and melancholy. It was half-past seven, and they who
did not normally dine at seven, dined at six-thirty.

Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous
black-bearded personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom,
vast of brow, wild-eyed with genius or with madness. In a
marvelous great voice, with a flavor of German accent, he in¬
quired for Dr. Silva, and sailed into the dean’s group like a
frigate among fishing-smacks.

“Who the dickens is that?” wondered Martin.

“Let’s edge in and find out,” said Clif, and they clung to
the fast increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery,
who was introduced as Dr. Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.

They heard Dr. Carr, to the pale admiration of the school-
bound assistant professors, boom genially of working with
Schmiedeberg in Germany on the isolation of dihydroxypen-
tamethylendiamin, of the possibilities of chemotherapy, of the
immediate cure of sleeping sickness, of the era of scientific
healing. “Though I am American-born, I have the advantage
of speaking German from a child, and so perhaps I can better
understand the work of my dear friend Ehrlich. I saw him
receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the Kaiser.
Dear old Ehrlich, he was like a child!”

There was at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and
1915) an active Germanophile section of the faculty. They
bent before this tornado of erudition. Angus Duer forgot that
he was Angus Duer; and Martin listened with excited stimu¬
lation. Benoni Carr had all of Gottlieb’s individuality, all his
scorn of machine-made teachers, all his air of a great world
which showed Mohalis as provincial, with none of Gottlieb’s
nervous touchiness. Martin wished Gottlieb were present; he
wondered whether the two giants would clash.

Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers’ table, near the dean.
Martin was astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after
a shocked inspection of the sour chicken and mishandled salad
which made up most of the dinner, pour something into his
water glass from a huge silver flask— and pour that something
frequently. He became boisterous. He leaned across two men
to slap the indignant dean on the shoulder; he contradicted his
neighbors; he sang a stanza of “I’m Bound Away for the Wild
Missourai.”

Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by
the students as the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.

ARROWSMITH

After an hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had
risen to announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and
shouted, “Let’s not have any speeches. Only fools make
speeches. Wise men sing songs. Whoopee! Oh, tireolee, oh,
tireolee, oh, tireolee a lady! You profs are the bunk!”

Dean Silva was to be seen beseeching him, then leading
him out of the room, with the assistance of two professors and
a football tackle, and in the hush of a joyful horror Clif
grunted to Martin:

“Here’s where I get mine! And the damn’ fool promised
to stay sober!”

“Huh?”

“I might of known he’d show up stewed and spill the beans.
Oh, maybe the dean won’t hand me hell proper!”

He explained. Dr. Benoni Carr was born Benno Karkow-
ski. He had graduated from a medical school which gave de¬
grees in two years. He had read vastly, but he had never
been in Europe. He had been “spieler” in medicine shows,
chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of sani¬
tariums for the diversion of neurotic women. Clif had encoun¬
tered him in Zenith, when they were both drunk. It was Clif
who had told Dean Silva that the celebrated pharmacologist,
just back from Europe, was in Zenith for a few days and per¬
haps might accept an invitation —

The dean had thanked Clif ardently.

The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention
to Dr. Rouncefield’s valuable address on the Sterilization of
Catgut.

Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin’s
several observations. Next day — he had a way with women
when he deigned to take the trouble — he pumped the dean’s
girl secretary, and discovered his fate. There had been a
meeting of a faculty committee; the blame for the Benoni
Carr outrage had been placed on Clif; and the dean had said
all the things Clif had imagined, with a number which he had
not possessed the talent to conceive. But the dean was not
going to summon him at once; he was going to keep him wait¬
ing in torture, then execute him in public.

“Good-by, old M.D. degree! Rats, I never thought much
of the doctor business. Guess I’ll be a bond salesman,” said
Clif to Martin. He strolled away, he went to the dean, and re¬
marked:

ARROWSMITH

“Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I’ve decided
to resign from the medic school. Been offered a big job in,
uh, in Chicago, and I don’t think much of the way you run
the school, anyway. Too much memorizing and too little real
spirit of science. Good luck, Doc. So long.”

“Gggggg — ” said Dean Silva.

Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave
up the double room at the front of his boarding-house for a
hall-room at the rear, and in that narrow den he sat and
mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He looked out on a
vacant lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and beans
flapped on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora’s eyes and
heard Clif’s comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as
he could not endure.

CHAPTER IX

The persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the
window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He
looked down on a startling roadster, all streamlines and cream
paint, with enormous headlights. He slowly made out that
the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose motor coat and
hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was Clif Clawson,
and that Clif was beckoning.

He hastened down, and Clif cried:

“Oh, boy! How do you like the boat? Do you diagnose
this suit? Scotch heather — honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed
off a twenty-five-buck-a-week job with commissions, selling
autos. Boy, I was lost in your old medic school. I can sell
anything to anybody. In a year I’ll be making eighty a week.
Jump in, old son. I’m going to take you in to the Grand
and blow you to the handsomest feed you ever stuffed into
your skinny organism.”

The thirty-eight miles an hour at which Clif drove into
Zenith was, in 1908, dismaying speed. Martin discovered a
new Clif. He was as noisy as ever, but more sure, glowing
with schemes for immediately acquiring large sums of money.
His hair, once bushy and greasy in front, tending to stick out
jaggedly behind, was sleek now, and his face had the pinkness
of massage. He stopped at the fabulous Grand Hotel with
a jar of brakes; before he left the car he changed his violent
yellow driving-gauntlets for a pair of gray gloves with black
stitching, which he immediately removed as he paraded
through the lobby. He called the coat-girl “Sweetie,” and at
the dining-room door he addressed the head-waiter:

“Ah, Gus, how’s the boy, how’s the boy feeling to-night?
How’s the mucho famoso majordomoso? Gus, want to make
you ’quainted with Dr. Arrowsmith. Any time the doc comes
here I want you to shake a leg and hand him out that well-
known service, my boy, and give him anything he wants, and
if he’s broke, you charge it to me. Now, Gus, I want a nice

ARROWSMITH

little table for two, with garage and hot and cold water, and
wouldst fain have thy advice, Gustavus, on the oysters and
hore duffers and all the ingredients fair of a Msecenan feast.”

“Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson,” breathed the head-
waiter.

Clif whispered to Martin, “I’ve got him like that in two
weeks! You watch my smoke!”

While Clif was ordering, a man stopped beside their table.
He resembled an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back
to his suburban bungalow every Saturday evening. He was
beginning to grow slightly bald, slightly plump. His rimless
eye-glasses, in the midst of a round smooth face, made him
seem innocent. He stared about as though he wished he had
some one with whom to dine. Clif darted up, patted the man s
elbow, and bawled:

“Ah. there, Babski, old boy. Feeding with anybody? Come
join the Sporting Gents’ Association.”

“All right, be glad to. Wife’s out of town,” said the man.

“Shake” hands with Dr. Arrowsmith. Mart, meet George F.
Babbitt, the hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king. Mr.
Babbitt has just adorned his thirty-fourth birthday by buying
his first benzine buggy from yours truly and beg to remain

as always.” , , . .

It was, at least on the part of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirth¬
ful affair and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St.
Louis beer, and highballs, he saw that Clif was the most
generous person now living, and Mr. George F. Babbitt a com¬

panion of charm.

Clif explained how certain he was — apparently his distin¬
guished medical training had something to do with it—' to be
president of a motor factory, and Mr. Babbitt confided.

“You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years,
and you haven’t learned yet, like I have, that where the big
pleasure is, is in Ideals and Service and a Public Career. Now-
just between you and me and the gatepost, my vogue doesn t
lie in real estate but in oratory. Fact, one time I planned
to study law and go right in for politics. Just between our¬
selves, and I don’t want this to go any farther, I ve been mak¬
ing some pretty good affiliations lately been meeting some
of the rising young Republican politicians. Of course a fellow
has got to start in modestly, but I may say, sotto voce, that 1
expect to run for alderman next fall. It’s practically only a

ARRO WSMITH

step from that to mayor and then to governor of the state,
and if I find the career suits me, there’s no reason why in
ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920, I shouldn’t have the
honor of representing the great state of Winnemac in Wash¬
ington, D. C.!”

In the presence of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like
George F. Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power
and business skill, and when he had returned to Mohalis he
was restless. Of his poverty he had rarely thought, but now,
in contrast to Clif’s rich ease, his own shabby clothes and his
pinched room seemed shameful.

A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able
to return to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed
worth doing. In that listless state he was mooning about the
laboratory during elementary bacteriology demonstration hour,
when Gottlieb sent him to the basement to bring up six male
rabbits for inoculation. Gottlieb was working eighteen hours
a day on new experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave
orders like insults. When Martin came dreamily back with
six females instead of males, Gottlieb shrieked at him, “You
are the worst fool that was ever in this lab ! ”

The groundlings, second-year men who were not unmindful
of Martin’s own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and
jarred him into raging, “Well, I couldn’t make out what you
said. And it’s the first time I ever fell down. I won’t stand
your talking to me like that!”

“You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take
your hat and get out!”

“You mean I’m fired as assistant?”

“I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand that,
no matter how wretchet I talk!”

Martin flung away. Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered
and took a step toward Martin’s retreating back. But the
class, the small giggling animals, they stood delighted, hoping
for more, and Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent
the least awkward of them for the rabbits, and went on, curi¬
ously quiet.

And Martin, at Barney’s dive, was hotly drinking the first
of the whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself.

ARROWS M ITH

With each drink he admitted that he had an excellent chance
to become a drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did
not care. Had Leora been nearer than Wheatsylvania, twelve
hundred miles away, he would have fled to her for salvation.
He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a
drink to make it possible to live through the morning when
he received the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to
the office at once.

The dean lectured:

“Arrowsmith, you’ve been discussed a good deal by the
faculty council of late. Except in one or two courses — in my
own I have no fault to find— you have been very inattentive.
Your marks have been all right, but you could do still better.
Recently you have also been drinking. You have been seen in
places of very low repute, and you have been intimate with a
man who took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our
guests, and the University. Various faculty members have
complained of your superior attitude — making fun of our
courses right out in class! But Dr. Gottlieb has always
warmly defended you. He insisted that you have a real flair
for investigative science. Last night, however, he admitted that
you had recently been impertinent to him. Now unless you
immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to
suspend you for the rest of the year and, if that doesn’t do
the work, I shall have to ask for your resignation. And I
think it might be a good thing for your humility — you seem to
have the pride of the devil, young man! — it might be a good
idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off your reforma¬
tion by apologizing — ”

It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:

“I’m damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I’ve given
him my life, and then he tattles on me — ”

“That’s absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely — ”
“Sure. He merely let me down. I’ll see him in hell before
I’ll apologize, after the way I’ve worked for him. And as for
Clif Clawson that you were hinting at — him ‘take it on him¬
self to insult anybody’? He just played a joke, and you went
after his scalp. I’m glad he did it! ”

Then Martin waited for the words that would end his
scientific life.

The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared
and hummed and spoke softly:

ARROWSMITH

“Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I
believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go.
Naturally, you’re suspended, at least till you come to your
senses and apologize to me and to Gottlieb.” He was fatherly;
almost he made Martin repent; but he concluded, “And as
for Clawson, his ‘joke’ regarding this Benoni Carr person —
and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose
I was too busy — his ‘joke,’ as you call it, was the action either
of an idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive
that fact, I don’t think you will be ready to come back to us.”

“All right,” said Martin, and left the room.

He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt,
was that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his
career, ended the possibility of his mastering science and of
marrying Leora, he still worshiped the man.

He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady.
He packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books,
his notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory,
the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag.
He remembered with drunken tears the hour of buying the din¬
ner jacket.

Martin’s money, from his father’s tiny estate, came in bi¬
monthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but
six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station
and sought Clif, whom he found practising eloquence over a
beautiful pearl-gray motor hearse, in which a beer-fed under¬
taker was jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and
twisted on the steel running-board of a limousine. He resented
but he was too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other
salesmen and the girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, “Well, well, how’s the boy? Come
out and catchum little drink.”

“I could use one.”

Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered
the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but
absent-minded ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a
mahogany bar, he blurted:

“Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva’s fired me, for general
footlessness. I’m going to bum around a little and then get
some kind of a job. God, but I’m tired and nervous! Say,
can you lend me some money?”

ARROWSMITH

“You bet. All I’ve got. How much you want?”

“Guess I’ll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite
some time.”

“Golly, I haven’t got that much, but prob’ly I can raise it
at the office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for
me.”

How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been ex¬
plained, but he was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went
on to dinner, and Martin had much too much whisky. Clif
took him to his own boarding-house — which was decidedly less
promissory of prosperity than Clif’s clothes — firmly gave him
a cold bath to bring him to, and put him to bed. Next morn¬
ing he offered to find a job for him, but Martin refused and
left Zenith by the northbound train at noon.

Always, in America, there remains from pioneer days a
cheerful pariahdom of shabby young men who prowl cause¬
lessly from state to state, from gang to gang, in the power of
the Wanderlust. They wear black sateen shirts, and carry
bundles. They are not permanently tramps. They have home
towns to which they return, to work quietly in the factory or
the section-gang for a year — for a week — and as quietly to
disappear again. They crowd the smoking cars at night; they
sit silent on benches in filthy stations; they know all the land
yet of it they know nothing, because in a hundred cities they
see only the employment agencies, the all-night lunches, the
blind-pigs, the scabrous lodging-houses. Into that world of
voyageurs Martin vanished. Drinking steadily, only half-con¬
scious of whither he was going, of what he desired to do, shame¬
fully haunted by Leora and Clif and the swift hands of Gott¬
lieb, he flitted from Zenith to the city of Sparta, across to
Ohio, up into Michigan, west to Illinois. His mind was a
shambles. He could never quite remember, afterward, where
he had been. Once, it is clear, he was soda-fountain clerk in a
Minnemagantic drug-store. Once he must have been, for a
week, dishwasher in the stench of a cheap restaurant. He wan¬
dered by freight trains, on blind baggages, on foot. To his
fellow prospectors he was known as “Slim,” the worst-tempered
and most restless of all their company.

After a time a sense of direction began to appear in his
crazy drifting. He was instinctively headed westward, and
to the west, toward the long prairie dusk, Leora was waiting.
For a day or two he stopped drinking. He woke up feeling not

ARROWSMITH

like the sickly hobo called “Slim,” but like Martin Arrow-
smith, and he pondered, with his mind running clear, “Why
shouldn’t I go back? Maybe this hasn’t been so bad for me.
I was working too hard. I was pretty high-strung. Blew up.
Like to, uh — Wonder what happened to my rabbits? . . .
Will they ever let me do research again?”

But to return to the University before he had seen Leora
was impossible. His need of her was an obsession, making
the rest of earth absurd and worthless. He had, with blurry
cunning, saved most of the hundred dollars he had taken from
Clif ; he had lived — very badly, on grease-swimming stews and
soda-reeking bread — by what he earned along the way. Sud¬
denly, on no particular day, in no particular town in Wiscon¬
sin, he stalked to the station, bought a ticket to Wheatsylvania,
North Dakota, and telegraphed to Leora, “Coming 2:43 to¬
morrow Wednesday Sandy.”

He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota. He
changed trains at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of
snow, cut by thin lines of fence-wire. He felt free, in release
from the little fields of Winnemac and Ohio, in relaxation
from the shaky nerves of midnight study and midnight boozi¬
ness. He remembered his days of wire-stringing in Montana
and regained that careless peace. Sunset was a surf of crim¬
son, and by night, when he stepped from the choking rail¬
road coach and tramped the platform at Sauk Center, he drank
the icy air and looked up to the vast and solitary winter stars.
The fan of the Northern Lights frightened and glorified the
sky. He returned to the coach with the energy of that cou¬
rageous land. He nodded and gurgled in brief smothering
sleep; he sprawled on the seat and talked with friendly fellow
vagrants; he drank bitter coffee and ate enormously of buck¬
wheat cakes at a station restaurant; and so, changing at
anonymous towns, he came at last to the squatty shelters, the
two wheat-elevators, the cattle-pen, the oil-tank, and the red
box of a station with its slushy platform, which composed the
outskirts of Wheatsylvania. Against the station, absurd in
a huge coonskin coat, stood Leora. He must have looked a
little mad as he stared at her from the vestibule, as he shivered
with the wind. She lifted to him her two open hands, childish

ARROWSMITH 99

in red mittens. He ran down, he dropped his awkward bag
on the platform and, unaware of the gaping furry farmers,
they were lost in a kiss.

Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness
of her wind-cooled cheeks.

The train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station. It had
stood like a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but
now the light from the snowfields glared in on them and left
them exposed and self-conscious.

“What — what’s happened?” she fluttered. “No letters. I
was so frightened.”

“Off bumming. The dean suspended me — being fresh to
profs. D’ y’ care?”

“Course not, if you wanted to — ”

“I’ve come to marry you.”

“I don’t see how we can, dearest, but — All right. There’ll
be a lovely row with Dad.” She laughed. “He’s always so sur¬
prised and hurt when anything happens that he didn’t plan
out. It’ll be nice to have you with me in the scrap, because
you aren’t supposed to know that he expects to plan out
everything for everybody and — Oh, Sandy, I’ve been so
lonely for you! Mother isn’t really a bit sick, not the least bit,
but they go on keeping me here. I think probably somebody
hinted to Dad that folks were saying he must be broke, if his
dear little daughter had to go off and learn nursing, and he
hasn’t worried it all out yet — it takes Andrew Jackson Tozer
about a year to worry out anything. Oh, Sandy! You’re
here!”

After the clatter and jam of the train, the village seemed
blankly empty. He could have walked around the borders of
Wheatsylvania in ten minutes. Probably to Leora one build¬
ing differed from another — she appeared to distinguish be¬
tween the general store of Norblom and that of Frazier & Lamb
— but to Martin the two-story wooden shacks creeping aim¬
lessly along the wide Main Street were featureless and inappre¬
ciable. Then “There’s our house, end of the next block,” said
Leora, as they turned the corner at the feed and implement
store, and in a panic of embarrassment Martin wanted to halt.
He saw a storm coming: Mr. Tozer denouncing him as a
failure who desired to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer weeping.

“Say — say — say — have you told ’em about me?” he stam¬
mered.

IOO

ARROWSMITH

“Yes. Sort of. I said you were a wonder in medic school,
and maybe we’d get married when you finished your interne-
ship, and then when your wire came, they wanted to know
why you were coming, and why it was you wired from Wis¬
consin, and what color necktie you had on when you were
sending the wire, and I couldn’t make ’em understand I didn’t
know. They discussed it. Quite a lot. They do discuss
things. All through supper. Solemn. Oh, Sandy, do curse
and swear some at meals.”

He was in a funk. Her parents, formerly amusing figures in
a story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown,
porchy house. A large plate-glass window with a colored
border had recently been cut through the wall, as a sign of
prosperity, and the garage was new and authoritative.

He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast. Mrs. Tozer
opened the door, and stared at him plaintively — a thin, faded,
unhumorous woman. She bowed as though he was not so much
unwelcome as unexplained and doubtful.

“Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?”
she peeped.

It was the kind of house that has a large phonograph but
no books, and if there were any pictures, as beyond hope
there must have been, Martin never remembered them. The
bed in his room was lumpy but covered with a chaste figured
spread, and the flowery pitcher and bowl rested on a cover
embroidered in red with lambs, frogs, water lilies, and a pious
motto.

He took as long as he could in unpacking things which
needed no unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs. No one
was in the parlor, which smelled of furnace-heat and balsam
pillows; then, from nowhere apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there,
worrying about him and trying to think of something polite to
say.

“Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?”

“Oh, yes, it was — Well, it was pretty crowded.”

“Oh, was it crowded?”

“Yes, there were a lot of people traveling.”

“Were there? I suppose — Yes. Sometimes I wonder where
all the people can be going that you see going places all the
time. Did you — was it very cold in the Cities — in Minneapolis
and St. Paul?”

“Yes, it was pretty cold.”

ARROWSMITH

IOI

“Oh, was it cold?”

Mrs. Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite. He felt like a
burglar taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where
Leora could be. She came in serenely, with coffee and a tre¬
mendous Swedish coffee-ring voluptuous with raisins and glis¬
tening brown sugar, and she had them talking, almost easily,
about the coldness of winter and the value of Fords when into
the midst of all this brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson Tozer,
and they drooped again to politeness.

Mr. Tozer was as thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as
his wife, and like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted.
He was astonished by everything in the world that did not
bear on his grain elevator, his creamery, his tiny bank, the
United Brethren Church, and the careful conduct of an Over¬
land car. It was not astounding that he should have become
almost rich, for he accepted nothing that was not natural and
convenient to Andrew Jackson Tozer.

He hinted a desire to know whether Martin “drank,” how
prosperous he was, and how he could possibly have come all
this way from the urbanities of Winnemac. (The Tozers were
born in Illinois, but they had been in Dakota since childhood,
and they regarded Wisconsin as the farthest, most perilous rim
of the Eastern horizon.) They were so blank, so creep ily
polite, that Martin was able to avoid such unpleasant subjects
as being suspended. He dandled an impression that he was
an earnest young medic who in no time at all would be making
large and suitable sums of money for the support of their
Leora, but as he was beginning to lean back in his chair he was
betrayed by the appearance of Leora’s brother.

Bert Tozer, Albert R. Tozer, cashier and vice-president of
the Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of
the Tozer Grain and Storage Company, treasurer and vice-
president of the Star Creamery, was not in the least afflicted
by the listening dubiousness of his parents. Bertie was a very
articulate and modern man of affairs. He had buck teeth, and
on his eye-glasses was a gold chain leading to a dainty hook be¬
hind his left ear. He believed in town-boosting, organized mo¬
tor tours, Boy Scouts, baseball, and the hanging of I. W. W.’s;
and his most dolorous regret was that Wheatsylvania was too
small — as yet — to have a Y. M. C. A. or a Commercial Club.
Plunging in beside him was his fiancee, Miss Ada Quist, daugh¬
ter of the feed and implement store. Her nose was sharp, but

102 ARROWSMITH

not so sharp as her voice or the suspiciousness with which she
faced Martin.

“This Arrowsmith?” demanded Bert. “Huh! Well, guess
you’re glad to be out here in God’s country!”

“Yes, it’s fine — ”

“Trouble with the Eastern states is, they haven’t got the
git, or the room to grow. You ought to see a real Dakota
harvest! Look here, how come you’re away from school this
time of year?”

“Why—”

“I know all about school-terms. I went to business college
in Grand Forks. How come you can get away now?”

“I took a little lay-off.”

“Leora says you and her are thinking of getting married.”

“We _ ”

“Got any cash outside your school-money?”

“I have not!”

“Thought so! How juh expect to support a wife?”

“I suppose I’ll be practising medicine some day.”

“Some day! Then what’s the use of talking about being en¬
gaged till you can support a wife?”

“That,” interrupted Bert’s lady-love, Miss Ada Quist, “that’s
just what I said, Ory!” She seemed to speak with her pointed
nose as much as with her button of a mouth. “If Bert and I
can wait, I guess other people can!”

Mrs. Tozer whimpered, “Don’t be too hard on Mr. Arrow-
smith, Bertie. I’m sure he wants to do the right thing.”

“I’m not being hard on anybody! I’m being sensible. If
Pa and you would tend to things instead of standing around
fussing, I wouldn’t have to butt in. I don’t believe in inter¬
fering with anybody else’s doings, or anybody interfering with
mine. Live and let live and mind your own business is my
motto, and that’s what I said to Alec Ingleblad the other day
when I was in there having a shave and he was trying to get
funny about our holding so many mortgages, but I’ll be blamed
if I’m going to allow a fellow that I don’t know anything about
to come snooping around My Sister till I find out something
about his prospects!”

Leora crooned, “Bertie, lamb, your tie is climbing your col¬
lar again.”

“Yes and you, Ory,” shrieked Bert, “if it wasn’t for me you’d
have married Sam Petchek, two years ago!”

ARROWS M ITH

103

Bert further said, with instances and illustrations, that she
was light-minded, and as for nursing — Nursing!

She said that Bert was what he was, and tried to explain
to Martin the matter of Sam Petchek. (It has never yet been
altogether explained.)

Ada Quist said that Leora did not care if she broke her dear
parents’ hearts and ruined Bert’s career.

Martin said, “Look here, I — ” and never got farther.

Mr. and Mrs. Tozer said they were all to be calm, and of
course Bert didn’t mean — But really, it was true; they had
to be sensible, and how Mr. Arrowsmith could expect to sup¬
port a wife —

The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer
pointed out, was everybody’s bedtime, and except for the five-
minute discussion as to whether Miss Ada Quist was to stay to
supper, and the debate on the saltiness of this last cornbeef,
they clave faithfully to the inquiry as to whether Martin and
Leora were engaged. All persons interested, which apparently
did not include Martin and Leora, decided that they were not.
Bert ushered Martin upstairs. He saw to it that the lovers
should not have a chance for a good-night kiss; and until Mr.
Tozer called down the hall, at seven minutes after ten, “You
going to stay up and chew the rag the whole blessed night,
Bert?” he made himself agreeable by sitting on Martin’s bed,
looking derisively at his shabby baggage, and demanding the
details of his parentage, religion, politics, and attitude toward
the horrors of card-playing and dancing.

At breakfast they all hoped that Martin would stay one
more night in their home — plenty of room.

Bert stated that Martin would come down-town at ten and
be shown the bank, creamery, and wheat elevator.

But at ten Martin and Leora were on the eastbound train.
They got out at the county seat, Leopolis, a vast city of four
thousand population, with a three-story building. At one that
afternoon they were married, by the German Lutheran pastor.
His study was a bareness surrounding a large, rusty wood-
stove, and the witnesses, the pastor’s wife and an old German
who had been shoveling walks, sat on the wood-box and looked
drowsy. Not till they had caught the afternoon train for
Wheatsylvania did Martin and Leora escape from the ghostly
apprehension which had hunted them all day. In the fetid
train, huddled close, hands locked, innocently free of the

104

ARROWSMITH

alienation which the pomposity of weddings sometimes casts
between lovers, they sighed, “Now what are we going to do—
what are we going to do?”

At the Wheatsylvania station they were met by the whole
family, rampant.

Bert had suspected elopement. He had searched half a
dozen towns by long-distance telephone, and got through to the
county clerk just after the license had been granted. It did
not soften Bert’s mood to have the clerk remark that if Mar¬
tin and Leora were of age, there was nothing he could do, and
he didn’t “care a damn who’s talking — I’m running this
office!”

Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin
perfect, even as Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.

It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.

Mr. Tozer said, with length, that Martin had undertaken
responsibilities.

Mrs. Tozer wept, and said that she hoped Ory had not, for
certain reasons, had, to be married —

Bert said that if such was the case, he’d kill Martin —

Ada Quist said that Ory could now see what came of pride
and boasting about going off to her old Zenith —

Mr. Tozer said that there was one good thing about it, any¬
way: Ory could see for herself that they couldn’t let her go
back to nursing school and get into more difficulties —

Martin from time to time offered remarks to the effect that
he was a good young man, a wonderful bacteriologist, and able
to take care of his wife; but no one save Leora listened.

Bert further propounded (while his father squeaked, “Now
don’t be too hard on the boy,”) that if Martin thought for
one single second that he was going to get one red cent out
of the Tozers because he’d gone and butted in where nobody’d
invited him, he, Bert, wanted to know about it, that was all,
he certainly wanted to know about it!

And Leora watched them, turning her little head from one
to another. Once she came over to press Martin’s hand. In
the roughest of the storm, when Martin was beginning to glare,
she drew from a mysterious pocket a box of very bad ciga¬
rettes, and lighted one. None of the Tozers had discovered
that she smoked. Whatever they thought about her sex morals,
her infidelity to United Brethrenism, and her general dementia,
they had not suspected that she could commit such an obscen-

ARROWS MITH

105

ity as smoking. They charged on her, and Martin caught his
breath savagely.

During these fulminations Mr. Tozer had somehow made
up his mind. He could at times take the lead away from Bert,
whom he considered useful but slightly indiscreet, and unable
to grasp the “full value of a dollar.” (Mr. Tozer valued it
at one dollar and ninety, but the progressive Bert at scarce
more than one-fifty.) Mr. Tozer mildly gave orders:

They were to stop “scrapping.” They had no proof that
Martin was necessarily a bad match for Ory. They would see.
Martin would return to medical school at once, and be a good
boy and get through as quickly as he could and begin to earn
money. Ory would remain at home and behave herself — and
she certainly would never act like a Bad Woman again, and
smoke cigarettes. Meantime Martin and she would have no,
uh, relations. (Mrs. Tozer looked embarrassed, and the hun¬
grily attentive Ada Quist tried to blush.) They could write
to each other once a week, but that was all. They would in no
way, uh, act as though they were married till he gave per¬
mission.

“Well?” he demanded.

Doubtless Martin should have defied them and with his
bride in his arms have gone forth into the night. But it seemed
only a moment to graduation, to beginning his practise. He
had Leora now, forever. For her, he must be sensible. He
would return to work, and be Practical. Gottlieb’s ideals of
science? Laboratories? Research? Rot!

“All right,” he said.

It did not occur to him that their abstention from love began
to-night; it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to
Leora, smiling with virtue at having determined to be prudent,
he heard Mr. Tozer cackling, “Ory, you go on up to bed now-
in your own room!”

That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards
from her.

Once he heard a door open, and thrilled to her coming. ^ He
waited, taut. She did not come. He peeped out, determined
to find her room. His deep feeling about his brother-in-law
suddenly increased. Bert was parading the hall, on guard.
Had Bert been more formidable, Martin might have killed him,
but he could not face that buck-toothed and nickering right¬
eousness. He lay and resolved to curse them all in the morn-

io6

ARROWSMITH

ing and go off with Leora, but with the coming of the three-
o’clock depression he perceived that with him she would prob¬
ably starve, that he was disgraced, that it was not at all cer¬
tain he would not become a drunkard.

“Poor kid, I’m not going to spoil her life. God, I do love
her! I’m going back, and the way I’m going to work — Can
I stand this?”

That was his bridal night and the barren dawn.

Three days later he was walking into the office of Dr. Silva,
dean of the Winnemac Medical School.

CHAPTER X

Dean Silva’s secretary looked up delightedly, she harkened
with anticipation. But Martin said meekly, “Please, could I
see the dean?” and meekly he waited, in the row of oak chairs
beneath the Dawson Hunziker pharmaceutical calendar.

When he had gone solemnly through the ground-glass door
to the dean’s office, he found Dr. Silva glowering. Seated, the
little man seemed large, so domed was his head, so full his
rounding mustache.

“Well, sir!”

Martin pleaded, “I’d like to come back, if you’ll let me.
Honest, I do apologize to you, and I’ll go to Dr. Gottlieb and
apologize — though honest, I can’t lay down on Clif Claw¬
son — ”

Dr. Silva bounced up from his chair, bristling. Martin
braced himself. Wasn’t he welcome? Had he no home, any¬
where? He could not fight. He had no more courage. He
was so tired after the drab journey, after restraining himself
from flaring out at the Tozers. He was so tired! He looked
wistfully at the dean.

The little man chuckled, “Never mind, boy. It’s all right!
We’re glad you’re back. Bother the apologies! I just wanted
you to do whatever’d buck you up. It’s good to have you
back! I believed in you, and then I thought perhaps we’d
lost you. Clumsy old man!”

Martin was sobbing, too weak for restraint, too lonely and
too weak, and Dr. Silva soothed, “Let’s just go over every¬
thing and find out where the trouble was. What can I do?
Understand, Martin, the thing I want most in life is to help
give the world as many good physicians, great healers, as I
can. What started your nervousness? Where have you been?”

When Martin came to Leora and his marriage, Silva purred,
“I’m delighted! She sounds like a splendid girl. Well, we
must try and get you into Zenith General for your internship,
a year from now, and make you able to support her properly.”

107

io8

ARROWSMITH

Martin remembered how often, how astringently, Gottlieb
had sneered at “dese merry vedding or jail bells.” He went
away Silva’s disciple; he went away to study furiously; and
the brilliant insanity of Max Gottlieb’s genius vanished from
his faith.

Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of
nursing for over-absence and for being married. She suspected
that it was her father who had informed the hospital authori¬
ties. Then, it appeared, she had secretly sent for a shorthand
book and, on pretense of helping Bert, she was using the type¬
writer in the bank, hoping that by next autumn she could
join Martin and earn her own living as a stenographer.

Once he offered to give up medicine, to take what work he
could find and send for her. She refused.

Though in his service to Leora and to the new god, Dean
Silva, he had become austere, denying himself whisky, learn¬
ing page on page of medicine with a frozen fury, he was always
in a vacuum of desire for her, and always he ran the last block
to his boarding-house, looking for a letter from her. Suddenly
he had a plan. He had tasted shame — this one last shame
would not matter. He would flee to her in Easter vacation;
he would compel Tozer to support her while she studied stenog¬
raphy in Zenith; he would have her near him through the last
year. He paid Clif the borrowed hundred, when the bi¬
monthly check came from Elk Mills, and calculated his finances
to the penny. By not buying the suit he distressingly needed,
he could manage it. Then for a month and more he had but
two meals a day, and of those meals one was bread and butter
and coffee. He washed his own linen in the bath-tub and,
except for occasional fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not
smoke.

His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except
that he talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between
uneasy naps in the red-plush seats of coaches, he studied the
bulky books of gynecology and internal medicine. He had
written certain instructions to Leora. He met her on the edge
of Wheatsylvania and they had a moment’s talk, a resolute
kiss.

News spreads not slowly in Wheatsylvania. There is a cer-

ARROWS MITH

iog

tain interest in other people’s affairs, and the eyes of citizens of
whose existence Martin did not know had followed him from
his arrival. When the culprits reached the bone-littered castle
of the Tozer ogres, Leora’s father and brother were already
there, and raging. Old Andew Jackson cried out upon them.
He said that conceivably it may not have been insane in Mar¬
tin to have “run away from school once, but to go and sneak
back this second time was absolutely plumb crazy.” Through
his tirade, Martin and Leora smiled confidently.

From Bert, “By God, sir, this is too much!” Bert had been
reading fiction. “I object to the use of profanity, but when
you come and annoy My Sister a second time, all I can say is,
by God, sir, this is too blame much!”

Martin looked meditatively out of the window. He noticed
three people strolling the muddy street. They all viewed the
Tozer house with hopeful interest. Then he spoke steadily:

“Mr. Tozer, I’ve been working hard. Everything has gone
fine. But I’ve decided I don’t care to live without my wife.
I’ve come to take her back. Legally, you can’t prevent me.
I’ll admit, without any argument, I can’t support her yet, if
I stay in the University. She’s going to study stenography.
She’ll be supporting herself in a few months, and meanwhile
I expect you to be decent enough to send her money.”

“This is too much,” said Tozer, and Bert carried it on:
“Fellow not only practically ruins a girl but comes and de¬
mands that we support her for him!”

“All right. Just as you want. In the long run it’ll be better
for her and for me and for you if I finish medic school and
have my profession, but if you won’t take care of her, I'll
chuck school, I’ll go to work. Oh, I’ll support her, all right!
Only you’ll never see her again. If you go on being idiots,
she and I will leave here on the night train for the Coast, and
that’ll be the end.” For the first time in his centuries of de¬
bate with the Tozers, he was melodramatic. He shook his fist
under Bert’s nose. “And if you tty to prevent our going, God
help you! And the way this town will laugh at you! . . .
How about it, Leora? Are you ready to go away with me —
forever?”

“Yes,” she said.

They discussed it, greatly. Tozer and Bert struck attitudes
of defense. They couldn’t, they said, be bullied by anybody.
Also, Martin was an Adventurer, and how did Leora know he

ARROWSMITH

wasn't planning to live on the money they sent her? In the
end they crawled. They decided that this new, mature Martin,
this new, hard-eyed Leora were ready to throw away everything
for each other.

Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her
seventy dollars a month till she should be prepared for office-
work.

At the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train win¬
dow, Martin realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering
Andrew Jackson Tozer did love his daughter, did mourn her
going.

He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of
Zenith, miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hos¬
pital had been; a square white and blue room, with blotchy
but shoulder-wise chairs. It looked out on breezy, stubbly
waste land reaching to distant glittering railroad tracks. The
landlady was a round German woman with an eye for romance.
It is doubtful if she ever believed that they were married. She
was a good woman.

Leora’s trunk had come. Her stenography books were
primly set out on her little table and her pink felt slippers
were arranged beneath the white iron bed. Martin stood with
her at the window, mad with the pride of proprietorship. Sud¬
denly he was so weak, so tired, that the mysterious cement
which holds cell to cell seemed dissolved, and he felt that he
was collapsing. But with knees rigidly straightening, his head
back, his lips tight across his teeth, he caught himself, and
cried, “Our first home!”

That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was in¬
toxication.

The commonplace room shone with peculiar light; the vig¬
orous weeds and rough grass of the waste land were radiant
under the April sun, and sparrows were cheeping.

“Yes,” said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.

Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Adminis¬
tration and Finance, which title indicated that it was a large

ARROWSMITH

and quite reasonably bad school for stenographers, bookkeep¬
ers, and such sons of Zenith brewers and politicians as were
unable to enter even state universities. She trotted daily to
the car-line, a neat, childish figure with note-books and sharp¬
ened pencils, to vanish in the horde of students. It was six
months before she had learned enough stenography to obtain
a place in an insurance office.

Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever
dearer. No one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At
least two evenings a week Martin dashed in from Mohalis
and studied there. She had a genius for keeping out of his
way, for not demanding to be noticed, so that, while he plunged
into his books as he never had done in Clif’s rustling, grunt¬
ing, expectorating company, he had ever the warm, half-con¬
scious feeling of her presence. Sometimes, at midnight, just as
he began to realize that he was hungry, he would find that a
plate of sandwiches had by silent magic appeared at his elbow.
He was none the less affectionate because he did not comment.
She made him secure. She shut out the world that had
pounded at him.

On their walks, at dinner, in the dissolute and deliciously
wasteful quarter-hour when they sat on the edge of the bed
with comforters wrapped about them and smoked an inexcusa¬
ble cigarette ^efore breakfast, he explained, his work to her,
and when her own studying was done, she tried to read which¬
ever of his books was not in use. Knowing nothing, never
learning much, of the actual details of medicine, yet she under¬
stood— better it may be than Angus Duer— his philosophy and
the basis of his work. If he had given up Gottlieb-worship
and his yearning for the laboratory as for a sanctuary, if he
had resolved to be a practical and wealth-mastering doctor, yet
something of Gottlieb’s spirit remained. He wanted to look
behind details and impressive-sounding lists of technical terms
for the causes of things, for general rules which might reduce
the chaos of dissimilar and contradictory symptoms to the

orderliness of chemistry. .

Saturday evening they went solemnly to the motion pictures
— one and two-reel films with Cowboy Billy Anderson and a
girl later to be famous as Mary Pickford and solemnly they
discussed the non-existent plots as they returned, unconscious
of other people on the streets; but when they walked into the
country on a Sunday (with four sandwiches and a bottle of

1 12

ARROWSMITH

ginger ale in his threadbare pockets), he chased her up-hill and
down-gully, and they lost their solemnity in joyous childish¬
ness. He intended, when he came to her room in the evening,
to catch the owl-car to Mohalis and be near his work when
he woke in the morning. He was resolute about it, always,
and she admired his efficiency, but he never caught the car.
The crew of the six o’clock morning interurban became used to
a pale, quick-moving young man who sat hunched in a back
seat, devouring large red books, absently gnawing a rather
dreadful doughnut. But in this young man there was
none of the heaviness of workers dragged out of bed at dawn
for another gray and futile day of labor. He appeared curi¬
ously determined, curiously content.

It was all so much easier, now that he was partly freed
from the tyrannical honesty of Gottliebism, from the un¬
swerving quest for causes which, as it drove through layer
below layer, seemed ever farther from the bottommost princi¬
ples, from the intolerable strain of learning day by day how
much he did not know. It warmed him to escape from Gott¬
lieb’s ice-box into Dean Silva’s neighborly world.

Now and then he saw Gottlieb on the campus. They bowed
in embarrassment and passed in haste.

There seemed to be no division between his Junior and Sen¬
ior years. Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain
in Mohalis all summer. The year and a half from his mar¬
riage to his graduation was one whirling bewilderment, with¬
out seasons or dates.

When he had, as they put it, “cut out his nonsense and
buckled down to work,” he had won the admiration of Dr.
Silva and all the Good Students, especially Angus Duer and
the Reverend Ira Hinkley. Martin had always announced that
he did not care for their approbation, for the applause of com¬
monplace drudges, but now that he had it, he prized it. How¬
ever much he scoffed, he was gratified when he was treated as
a peer by Angus, who spent the summer as extern in the
Zenith General Hospital, and who already had the unapproach¬
able dignity of a successful young surgeon.

Through that hot summer Martin and Leora labored, pant¬
ing, and when they sat in her room, over their books and a

ARROWS MITH

1 13

stout pot of beer, neither their costumes nor their language
had the decorum which one ought to expect from a romantic
pair devoted to science and high endeavor. They were not
very modest. Leora came to use, in her casual way, such
words, such ancient Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as would have
dismayed Angus or Bert Tozer. On their evenings off they
went economically to an imitation Coney Island beside a
scummy and stinking lake, and with grave pleasure they ate
Hot Dogs, painstakingly they rode the scenic railway.

Their chief appetizer was Clif Clawson. Clif was never
willingly alone or silent except when he was asleep. It is
probable that his success in motor-salesmanship came entirely
from his fondness for the enormous amounts of bright con¬
versation which seem necessary in that occupation. How much
of his attention to Martin and Leora was friendliness and how
much of it was due to his fear of being alone cannot be deter¬
mined, but certainly he entertained them and drew them out of
themselves, and never seemed offended by the surly unwill¬
ingness with which Martin was sometimes guilty of greeting
him.

He would come roaring up to the house in a motor, the
muffler always cut out. He would shout at their window,
“Come on, you guys! Come out of it! Shake a leg! Lez
have a little drive and get cooled off, and then I’ll buy you a
feed.”

That Martin had to work, Clif never comprehended. There
was small excuse for Martin’s occasional brutality in show¬
ing his annoyance but, now that he was fulfilled in Leora and
quite thoroughly and selfishly careless as to what hungry need
others might have of himself, now that he was in a rut of in¬
dustry and satisfied companionship, he was bored by Clif’s
unchanging flood of heavy humor. It was Leora who was
courteous. She had heard rather too often the seven jokes
which, under varying guises, made up all of Clif’s humor and
philosophy, but she could sit for hours looking amiable while
Clif told how clever he was at selling, and she sturdily reminded
Martin that they would never have a friend more loyal or
generous.

But Clif went to New York, to a new motor agency, and
Martin and Leora were more completely and happily dependent
on each other than ever before.

Their last agitation was removed by the complacence of

ARROWSMITH

1 4

Mr. Tozer. He was cordial now in all his letters, however
much he irritated them by the parental advice with which he
penalized them for every check he sent.

None of the hectic activities of Senior year — neurology and
pediatrics, practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories
in the hospitals, attendance on operations, dressing wounds,
learning not to look embarrassed when charity patients called
one “Doctor” — was quite so important as the discussion of
“What shall we do after graduation?”

Is it necessary to be an intern for more than a year? Shall
we remain general practitioners all our lives, or work toward
becoming specialists? Which specialties are the best — that is,
the best paid? Shall we settle in the country or in the city?
How about going West? What about the army medical corps;
salutes, riding-boots, pretty women, travel?

This discussion they harried in the corridors of Main Medi¬
cal, at the hospital, at lunch-rooms; and when Martin came
home to Leora he went through it all again, very learnedly,
very explanatorily. Almost every evening he “reached a de¬
cision” which was undecided again by morning.

Once when Dr. Loizeau, professor of surgery, had operated
before a clinic which included several renowned visiting doc¬
tors — the small white figure of the surgeon below them, slash¬
ing between life and death, dramatic as a great actor taking
his curtain-call — Martin came away certain that he was for
surgery. He agreed then with Angus Duer, who had just won
the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery, that the
operator was the lion, the eagle, the soldier among doctors.
Angus was one of the few who knew without wavering pre¬
cisely what he was going to do: after his internship he was
to join the celebrated Chicago clinic headed by Dr. Rounce-
field, the eminent abdominal surgeon. He would, he said
briefly, be making twenty thousand a year as a surgeon within
five years.

Martin explained it all to Leora. Surgery. Drama. Fear¬
less nerves. Adoring assistants. Save lives. Science in de¬
vising new techniques. Make money — not be commercial, of
course, but provide Leora with comforts. To Europe — they
two together — gray London. Viennese cafes. Leora was use-

ARROWSMITH

115

ful to him during his oration. She blandly agreed; and the
next evening, when he sought to prove that surgery was all
rot and most surgeons merely good carpenters, she agreed more
amiably than ever.

Next to Angus, and the future medical missionary, Ira Hink-
ley, Fatty Pfaff was the first to discover what his future was.
He was going to be an obstetrician— or, as the medical stu¬
dents called it technically, a “baby-snatcher.” Fatty had the
soul of a midwife; he sympathized with women in their gasp¬
ing agony, sympathized honestly and almost tearfully, and he
was magnificent at sitting still and drinking tea and waiting.
During his first obstetrical case, when the student with him
was merely nervous as they fidgeted by the bed in the hard
desolation of the hospital room, Fatty was terrified, and he
longed as he had never longed for anything in his flabby yet
wistful life to comfort this gray-faced, straining, unknown
woman, to take her pains on himself.

While the others drifted, often by chance, often through rela¬
tives, into their various classes, Martin remained doubtful.
He admired Dean Silva’s insistence on the physician’s imme¬
diate service to mankind, but he could not forget the cool
ascetic hours in the laboratory. Toward the end of Senior
year, decision became necessary, and he was moved by a
speech in which Dean Silva condemned too much specializa¬
tion and pictured the fine old country doctor, priest and father
of his people, sane under open skies, serene in self-conquest.
On top of this came urgent letters from Mr. Tozer, begging
Martin to settle in Wheatsylvania.

Tozer loved his daughter, apparently, and more or less liked
Martin, and he wanted them near him. Wheatsylvania was a
“good location,” he said: solid Scandinavian and Dutch and
German and Bohemian farmers who paid their bills. The
nearest doctor was Hesselink, at Groningen, nine and a half
miles away, and Hesselink had more than he could do. If
they would come, he would help Martin buy his equipment;
he would even send him a check now and then during his two-
year hospital internship. Martin’s capital was practically gone.
Angus Duer and he had received appointments to Zenith Gen¬
eral Hospital, where he would have an incomparable training,
but Zenith General gave its interns, for the first year, nothing
but board and room, and he had feared that he could not take
the appointment. Tozer’s offer excited him. All night Leora

ARROWSMITH

116

and he sat up working themselves into enthusiasm about the
freedom of the West, about the kind hearts and friendly hands
of the pioneers, about the heroism and usefulness of country
doctors, and this time they reached a decision which remained
decided.

They would settle in Wheatsylvania.

If he ached a little for research and Gottlieb’s divine curi¬
osity — well, he would be such a country doctor as Robert
Koch! He would not degenerate into a bridge-playing, duck¬
hunting drone. He would have a small laboratory of his own.
So he came to the end of the year and graduated, looking
rather flustered in his cap and gown. Angus stood first and
Martin seventh in the class. He said good-by, with lamenta¬
tions and considerable beer; he found a room for Leora nearer
to the hospital; and he emerged as Martin L. Arrowsmith,
M.D., house physician in the Zenith General Hospital.

CHAPTER XI

The Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was
agitated by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of
scorched timber, the infernal bells of charging fire-apparatus.
Miles of small wooden houses west of the factory were threat¬
ened, and shawled women, tousled men in trousers over night¬
shirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a thick mut¬
ter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.

With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking
the dripping engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press
of people, swinging their clubs, shouting, “Get back there,
you!” The fire-line was sacred. Only the factory-owner and
the reporters were admitted. A crazy-eyed factory-hand was
stopped by a police sergeant.

“My tools are in there!” he shrieked.

“That don’t make no never-minds,” bawled the strutting
sergeant. “Nobody can’t get through here!”

But one got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of
a racing ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without or¬
ders, the crowd opened, and through them, almost grazing them,
slid the huge gray car. At the back, haughty in white uni¬
form, nonchalant on a narrow seat, was The Doctor — Martin
Arrowsmith.

The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive
him.

“Where’s the fireman got hurt?” he snapped.

“Over in that shed,” cried the police sergeant, running be¬
side the ambulance.

“Drive over closer. Nev’ mind the smoke! ” Martin barked
at the driver.

A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which
was huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and
clammy.

“He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and
keeled over. Fine kid. Is he a goner?” the lieutenant begged.

Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his

ARRO WSMITH

118

breathing. Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a
hypodermic of strychnin and held a vial of ammonia to his
nose. “He’ll come around. Here, you two, getum into the
ambulance — hustle!”

The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman
sprang together, and together they mumbled, “All right, Doc.”

To Martin came the chief reporter of the Advocate-Times.
In years he was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and
perhaps the most cynical man in the world. He had inter¬
viewed senators; he had discovered graft in charity societies
and even in prize-fights. There were fine wrinkles beside his
eyes, he rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his
opinion of man’s honor and woman’s virtue was but low. Yet
to Martin, or at least to The Doctor, he was polite.

“Will he pull through, Doc?” he twanged.

“Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart’s still going.”

Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the
ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory
yard, through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking crowd.
He owned and commanded the city, he and the driver. They
ignored traffic regulations, they disdained the people, return¬
ing from theaters and movies, who dotted the streets which un¬
rolled before the flying gray hood. Let ’em get out of the way!
The traffic officer at Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them
coming, speeding like the Midnight Express — urrrrrr — blang-
blang-blang-blang — and cleared the noisy corner. People were
jammed against the curb, threatened by rearing horses and
backing motors, and past them hurled the ambulance, blang-
blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swing¬
ing easily on his perilous seat.

At the hospital the hall-man cried, “Shooting case in the
Arbor, Doc.”

“All right. Wait’ll I sneak in a drink,” said Martin plac¬
idly.

On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hos¬
pital laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of
flasks and test-tubes.

“Huh! That stuff! Poking ’round labs! This is real sure-
enough life,” he exulted, and he did not permit himself to see
the vision of Max Gottlieb waiting there, so gaunt, so tired,
so patient.

ARROW SMITH

119

The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and
Angus Duer, lived in a long dark room with six camp beds,
and six bureaus fantastic with photographs and ties and un¬
darned socks. They spent hours sitting on their beds, argu¬
ing surgery versus internal medicine, planning the dinners
which they hoped to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining
to Martin, as the only married man, the virtues of the various
nurses with whom, one by one, they fell in love.

Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though
he developed the Intern’s Walk, that quick corridor step with
the stethoscope conspicuous in the pocket, he did not, he could
not, develop the bedside manner. He was sorry for the bruised,
yellowed, suffering patients, always changing as to individuals
and never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he had
thrice dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go
on to new experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the
hospital was endlessly stimulating to his pride.

The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in
the slum called “the Arbor.” His black bag was a pass. Po¬
licemen saluted him, prostitutes bowed to him without mock¬
ery, saloon-keepers called out, “Evenin’, Doc,” and hold-up
men stood back in doorways to let him pass. Martin had
power, the first obvious power in his life. And he was led
into incessant adventure.

He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the fam¬
ily conceal the disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and
afterward, when he thought of how he might have dined with
Leora, he was sorry he had refused it. He broke into hotel-
rooms reeking with gas and revived would-be suicides. He
drank Trinidad rum with a Congressman who advocated pro¬
hibition. He attended a policeman assaulted by strikers, and
a striker assaulted by policemen. He assisted at an emergency
abdominal operation at three o’clock in the morning. The
operating-room — white tile walls and white tile floor and glit¬
tering frosted-glass skylight — seemed lined with fire-lit ice, and
the large incandescents glared on the glass instrument cases,
the cruel little knives. The surgeon, in long white gown, white
turban, and pale orange rubber gloves, made his swift incision
in the square of yellowish flesh exposed between towels, cutting
deep into layers of fat, and Martin looked on unmoved as the

120

ARROWSMITH

first blood menacingly followed the cut. And a month after,
during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for seventy-six
hours, with half-hours of sleep in the ambulance or on a
police-station table.

He landed from a boat at what had been the second story
of a tenement and delivered a baby on the top floor ; he bound
up heads and arms for a line of men ; but what gave him glory
was the perfectly foolhardy feat of swimming the flood to save
five children marooned and terrified on a bobbing church pew.
The newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he had
returned to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and
thought about research with salty self-defensive scorn.

“Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I’d like to see
him swim that current!” jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.

But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had
been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the labora¬
tory, for the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below
the surface and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental
laws which the scientist (however blasphemously and collo¬
quially he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing
as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God
above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy
that he should be left out of things, that others should go
ahead of him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of
the phenomena of biological chemistry, more deeply daring
to explain laws at which the pioneers had but fumbled and
hinted.

In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires
and floods and murder became as obvious a routine as book¬
keeping, when he had seen the strangely few ways in which
mankind can contrive to injure themselves and slaughter one
another, when it was merely wearing to have to live up to the
pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy
and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary scrab¬
bling about the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts
in pernicious anemia. His trifling with the drug of research
was risky. Amid the bustle of operations he began to pic¬
ture the rapt quietude of the laboratory. “I better cut this
out,” he said to Leora, “if I’m going to settle down in Wheat-
sylvania and ’tend to business and make a living — and I by
golly am!”

Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations. H3

ARROWSMITH

121

passed through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned
from the office where she was a stenographer, was meeting
Martin for dinner. Martin introduced them, and the little
man held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked, “Will you
children give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My
wife has deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man.”

He trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he
were not student and teacher, but two doctors together, for
Dean Silva was one pedagogue who could still be interested
in a man who no longer sat at his feet. He led the two
starvelings to a chop-house and in a settle-walled booth he
craftily stuffed them with roast goose and mugs of ale.

He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:

“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of
trifles like these laboratory men.”

“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.

“No-o. But with him — It’s a difference of one’s gods.
Gottlieb’s gods are the cynics, the destroyers — crapehangers,
the vulgar call ’em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great
men, wonder-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying
other people’s theories than creating their own. But my gods
now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s
gods and turned them to the use of human beings — made them
come alive!

“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but
there’s more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who
used those discoveries! Laennec and Osier, those are the men!
It’s all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the
truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting
to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses.
But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man
could justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobble¬
stones on Warehouse Avenue — yes, and justify himself for tor¬
turing people just to see how they screamed — and then sneer
at a man who was making millions of people well and happy!

“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate
fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of
mankind. He’s chosen the highest calling in the world, but
he’s a feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it,
my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit of his passion.”

After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical
comedy and sat between them, patting Martin’s shoulder, pat-

122

ARROWSMITH

ting Leora’s arm, choking with delight when the comedian
stepped into the pail of whitewash. In midnight volubility Mar¬
tin and Leora sputtered their affection for him, and saw their
Wheatsylvania venture as glory and salvation.

But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and
their migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on
the street.

Martin had not seen him for more than a year ; Leora never.
He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as
to whether to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.

“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his
eyes said, “Why have you never come back to me?”

The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb
had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run
after him.

Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re
always talking about?”

“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”

“I don’t — Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I
don’t know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but
that was a great man! I wish — I wish we were going to see
him again. There’s the first man I ever laid eyes on that I’d
leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so — oh, he’s like a sword
— no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so
wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”

“God! So would I!”

But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the
journey to Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examina¬
tions, the dignity of being a Practising Physician, he forgot
Gottlieb, and on that Dakota prairie radiant in early June,
with meadow larks on every fence post, he began his work.

CHAPTER XII

At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb
was ruined.

Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850.
Though he took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was
never interested in practising medicine. He was a follower of
Helmholtz, and youthful researches in the physics of sound
convinced him of the need of the quantitative method in the
medical sciences. Then Koch’s discoveries drew him into bi¬
ology. Always an elaborately careful worker, a maker of long
rows of figures, always realizing the presence of uncontrollable
variables, always a vicious assailant of what he considered
slackness or lie or pomposity, never too kindly to well-inten¬
tioned stupidity, he worked in the laboratories of Koch, of
Pasteur, he followed the early statements of Pearson in biomet¬
rics, he drank beer and wrote vitriolic letters, he voyaged to
Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between two
days, he married (as he might have bought a coat or hired a
housekeeper) the patient and wordless daughter of a Gentile
merchant.

Then began a series of experiments, very important, very
undramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappre¬
ciated. Back in 1881 he was confirming Pasteur’s results in
chicken cholera immunity and, for relief and pastime, trying
to separate an enzyme from yeast. A few years later,
living on the tiny inheritance from his father, a petty
banker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully exhausting it, he
was analyzing critically the ptomain theory of disease, and
investigating the mechanism of the attenuation of virulence
of microorganisms. He got thereby small fame. Perhaps he
was over-cautious, and more than the devil or starvation he
hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.

Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the
most repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he
was a sufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers. As

123

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ARROWSMITH

a youngster he had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns;
once he spent a week in jail; often he was infuriated by dis¬
criminations against Jews: and at forty he went sadly off
to the America which could never become militaristic or anti-
'Semitic — to the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn, then to
Queen City University as professor of bacteriology.

Here he made his first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin re¬
actions. He announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin,
had no relation to the immune state of an animal, and while
he himself was being ragingly denounced in the small but
hectic world of scientists, he dealt calmly and most brutally
with Yersin’s and Marmorek’s theories of sera.

His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research,
was the artificial production of antitoxin — its production in
vitro. Once he was prepared to publish, but he found an
error and rigidly suppressed his notes. All the while he was
lonely. There was apparently no one in Queen City who re¬
garded him as other than a cranky Jew catching microbes by
their little tails and leering at them — no work for a tall man
at a time when heroes were building bridges, experimenting
with Horseless Carriages, writing the first of the poetic Com¬
pelling Ads, and selling miles of calico and cigars.

In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as
professor of bacteriology in the medical school, and here he
drudged on for a dozen years. Not once did he talk of results
of the sort called “practical”; not once did he cease warring on
the post hoc propter hoc conclusions which still make up most
medical lore; not once did he fail to be hated by his colleagues,
who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in feeling his
ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto, Diabo-
list, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic,
Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intel¬
lectual Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with
reason, that he was so devoted to Pure Science, to art for art’s
sake, that he would rather have people die by the right therapy
than be cured by the wrong. Having built a shrine for hu¬
manity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.

The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm
'where really clever people published five times a year, was
not more than twenty-five in thirty years. They were all ex¬
quisitely finished, all easily reduplicated and checked by the
doubtfullest critics.

ARROW SMITH

125

At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by
excellent assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs,
enough monkeys; but he was bored by the round of teaching,
and melancholy again in a lack of understanding friends.
Always he sought some one to whom he could talk without
suspicion or caution. He was human enough, when he medi¬
tated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance,
of inventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated
by his lack of fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to com¬
plain not too nobly.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize,
never been interviewed, never produced anything which the
public could understand, nor experienced anything since his
schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic..
He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will
never, in any age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or
the petty infections which will not have been influenced by Max
Gottlieb’s researches, for he was not one who tagged and
prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. He sought their chem¬
istry, the laws of their existence and destruction, basic laws
for the most part unknown after a generation of busy biolo¬
gists. Yet they were right who called him “pessimist,” for
this man who, as much as any other, will have been the cause
of reducing infectious diseases to almost-zero often doubted
the value of reducing infectious diseases at all.

He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was
joined by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen gen¬
erations nearly free from epidemics would produce a race so
low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly
springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering cloud, ap¬
peared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the
measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the
end be the destruction of all human life.

He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove
tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly
certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal
slave-packed shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom
would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence.
Yet these speculations never checked his work. If the future
became overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or other¬
wise look to itself. Perhaps it would, he reflected. But even

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ARRO WSMITH

this drop of wholesome optimism was lacking in his final
doubts. For he doubted all progress of the intellect and the
emotions, and he doubted, most of all, the superiority of divine
mankind to the cheerful dogs, the infallibly graceful cats, the
unmoral and unagitated and irreligious horses, the superbly
adventuring sea-gulls.

While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines,
chewing-gum salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in
large houses, attended by servants, and took their sacred per¬
sons abroad in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped
cottage whose paint was peeling, and rode to his laboratory
on an ancient and squeaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself pro¬
tested rarely. He was not so unreasonable — usually — as to
demand both freedom and the fruits of popular slavery.
“Why,” he once said to Martin, “should the world pay me
for doing what I want and what they do not want?”

If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his
desk were letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the
great ones of France and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and
from scientists whom Great Britain so much valued that she
gave them titles almost as high as those with which she re¬
warded distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the owners of
obscene newspapers.

But poverty kept him from fulfilment of his summer long¬
ing to sit beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil
Seine, at a table on whose checkered cloth were bread and
cheese and wine and dusky cherries, those ancient and holy
simplicities of all the world.

Max Gottlieb’s wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at
sixty she had not learned to speak easy English ; and her Ger¬
man was of the small-town bourgeois, who pay their debts and
over-eat and grow red. If he was not confidential with her,
if at table he forgot her in long reflections, neither was he un¬
kind or impatient, and he depended on her housekeeping, her
warming of his old-fashioned nightgown. She had not been
well of late. She had nausea and indigestion, but she kept on
with her work. Always you heard her old slippers slapping
about the house.

ARRO WSMITH

127

They had three children, all born when Gottlieb was over
thirty-eight: Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had
a touch at the piano, an instinct about Beethoven, and hatred
for the “ragtime” popular in America; an older sister who
was nothing in particular ; and their boy Robert — Robert Koch
Gottlieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. They sent him,
with anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith,
where he met the sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste
for fast motors and eccentric clothes, and no taste whatever
for studying. At home he clamored that his father was a
“tightwad.” When Gottlieb sought to make it clear that he
was a poor man, the boy answered that out of his poverty he
was always sneakingly spending money on his researches — he
had no right to do that and shame his son — let the confounded
University provide him with material!

There were few of Gottlieb’s students who saw him and his
learning as anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as
possible. One of the few was Martin Arrowsmith.

However harshly he may have pointed out Martin’s errors,
however loftily he may have seemed to ignore his devotion,
Gottlieb was as aware of Martin as Martin of him. He
planned vast things. If Martin really desired his help (Gott¬
lieb could be as modest personally as he was egotistic and
swaggering in competitive science), he would make the boy’s
career his own. During Martin’s minute original research,
Gottlieb rejoiced in his willingness to abandon conventional
and convenient — theories of immunology and in the exasper¬
ated carefulness with which he checked results. When Martin
for unknown reasons became careless, when he was obviously
drinking too much, obxiously mixed up in some absurd per¬
sonal affair, it was tragic hunger for friends and flaming re¬
spect for excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him.
Of the apologies demanded by Silva he had no notion. He
would have raged —

He waited for Martin to return. He blamed himself: “Fool!
There was a fine spirit. You should have known one does not
use a platinum loop for shoveling coal.” As long as he could
(while Martin was dish-washing and wandering on improbable

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ARROWSMITH

trains between impossible towns), he put off the appointment
of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled to anger.
He considered Martin a traitor, and put him out of his mind.

It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly
he was mad as any genius. He did, during the period of Mar¬
tin’s internship in Zenith General, a thing more preposterous
than any of the superstitions at which he scoffed.

He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the
cynic, the anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went
at it like a spinster organizing a league to keep small boys
from learning naughty words.

He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical
school which should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact
quantitative biology and chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and
most of surgery ignored, and he further conceived that such
an enterprise might be conducted at the University of Winne-
mac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he was extremely
practical and plausible!

“I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure
village bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable
and altogether necessary — perhaps. But there are too many
of them already. And on the ‘practical’ side, you gif me
twenty years of a school that is precise and cautious, and we
shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer, and all these
arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads at them
and call them ‘rheumatism.’ So!”

He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any
credit. He was too busy. But at a meeting of the American
Academy of Sciences he met one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish
physiologist from Harvard, who would make an excellent
dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on his willing¬
ness to be called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new
sort of medical school, Entwisle was fervent. “Nothing I’d
like so much as to have a chance at a place like that,” he flut¬
tered, and Gottlieb went back to Mohalis triumphant. He was
the more assured because (though he sardonically refused it)
he was at this time offered the medical deanship of the Uni¬
versity of West Chippewa.

So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva

ARRO WSM ITH

129

politely bidding him step down and hand over his school —
his work, his life — to an unknown teacher in Harvard! A cour¬
teous old gentleman was Dad Silva, a fit disciple of Osier, but
this incredible letter killed his patience. He replied that while
he could see the value of basic research, the medical school
belonged to the people of the state, and its task was to pro¬
vide them with immediate and practical attention. For him¬
self, he hinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit
by his resignation he would go at once, but he needed a rather
broader suggestion than a letter from one of his own subordi¬
nates!

Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned
the People of the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their
present condition of nincompoopery, worth any sort of atten¬
tion? He unjustifiably took his demand over Silva’s head to
that great orator and patriot, Dr. Horace Greeley Truscott,.
president of the University.

President Truscott said, “Really, I’m too engrossed to con¬
sider chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.”

“You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary-
degrees to millionaires for gymnasiums,” remarked Gottlieb.

Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the Uni¬
versity Council. As head of the medical department of bac¬
teriology, Gottlieb was a member of this all-ruling body, and
when he entered the long Council Chamber, with its gilt ceil¬
ing, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings of pio¬
neers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of
whispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.

“Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there
at the far end of the table?” called President Truscott.

Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of
the seven members of the Board of Regents, the four who
lived in or near Zenith were present. He saw that sitting be¬
side Truscott was not the dean of the academic department but
Dean Silva. He saw that however easily they talked, they
were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.

President Truscott announced, “Gentlemen, this joint meet¬
ing of the Council and the regents is to consider charges
against Professor Max Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by
myself.”

Gottlieb suddenly looked old.

“These charges are: Disloyalty to his dean, his president,,

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ARROWSMITH

his regents, and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to rec¬
ognized medical and scholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Athe¬
ism. Persistent failure to collaborate with his colleagues, and
such inability to understand practical affairs as makes it dan¬
gerous to let him conduct the important laboratories and
classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I shall
now prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb’s own
letters to Dean Silva.”

He proved them.

The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, “Gottlieb,
I think it would simplify things if you just handed us your
resignation and permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of
having the unpleasant — ”

“I’m damned if I will resign!” Gottlieb was on his feet, a
lean fury. “Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links
minds, you are twisting my expression, and perfectly accurate
expression, of a sound revolutionary ideal, which would per¬
sonally to me be of no value or advantage whatefer, into a
desire to steal promotions. That fools should judge honor — !”
His long forefinger was a fish-hook, reaching for President
Truscott’s soul. “No! I will not resign! You can cast me
out!”

“I’m afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while
we vote.” The president was very suave, for so large and
strong and hearty a man.

Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It
was by telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the
president’s office that he was informed that “his resignation
had been accepted.”

He agonized, “Discharge me? They couldn’t! I’m the
chief glory, the only glory, of this shopkeepers’ school ! ” When
he comprehended that apparently they very much had dis¬
charged him, he was shamed that he should have given them
a chance to kick him. But the really dismaying thing was
that he should by an effort to be a politician have interrupted
the sacred work.

He required peace and a laboratory, at once.

They’d see what fools they were when they heard that Har¬
vard had called him!

He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Bos¬
ton. Why had he remained so long in raw Mohalis? He
wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that he was willing to hear an

ARROWSMITH

131

offer. He expected a telegram. He waited a week, then had a
long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been prema¬
ture in speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented
the faculty’s compliments and their hope that some time they
might have the honor of his presence, but as things were now —

Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that,
after all, he was willing to think about their medical deanship
. . . and had answer that the place was filled, that they had
not greatly liked the tone of his former letter, and they did
not “care to go into the matter further.”

At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars —
literally a few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he
had to have a job or go hungry. He was no longer a genius
impatient of interrupted creation but a shabby schoolmaster
in disgrace.

He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers,
staring at his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing.
He still had a month of teaching — they had dated ahead the
resignation which they had written for him — but he was too
dispirited to go to the laboratory. He felt unwanted, almost
unsafe. His ancient sureness was broken into self-pity. He
waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely there
would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he
meant. There were many friendly letters about research, but
the sort of men with whom he corresponded did not listen to
intercollegiate faculty tattle nor know of his need.

He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West
Chippewa rebuke, approach the universities or the scientific
institutes, and he was too proud to write begging letters to the
men wrho revered him. No, he would be business-like! He
applied to a Chicago teachers’ agency, and received a stilted
answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he
would care to take the position of teacher of physics and chem¬
istry in a suburban high school.

Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able
to reply, his household was overwhelmed by his wife’s sudden
agony.

She had been unwell for months. He had wanted her to see
a physician, but she had refused, and all the while she was
stolidly terrified by the fear that she had cancer of the stom¬
ach. Now when she began to vomit blood, she cried to him
for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical credos, at

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ARROWSMITH

“carpenters” and “pill mongers,” had forgotten what he knew
of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for
the doctor as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom
illness was the black malignity of unknown devils.

In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel
with Silva was not personal, he could still summon him, and this
time he was justified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity,
chuckling to himself, “When he’s got something the matter, he
doesn’t run for Arrenhius or Jacques Loeb, but for me! ” Into
the meager cottage the little man brought strength, and Gott¬
lieb gazed down on him trustingly.

Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not
without satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even
know the dose. He examined her — his pudgy hands had the
sensitiveness if not the precision of Gottlieb’s skeleton fingers.
He peered about the airless bedroom: the dark green cur¬
tains, the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-print of a
virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an im¬
pression of having recently been in the room. He remembered.
It was the twin of the doleful chamber of a German grocer
whom he had seen during a consultation a month ago.

He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but
as a patient, to be cheered.

“Don’t think there’s any tumorous mass. As of course you
know, Doctor, you can tell such a lot by the differences in the
shape of the lower border of the ribs, and by the surface of
the belly during deep breathing.”

“Oh, yesss.”

“I don’t think you need to worry in the least. We’d better
hustle her off to the University Hospital, and we’ll give her a
test meal and get her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler
bugs.”

She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage
steps. Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her,
whether he was capable of ordinary domestic affection, could
not be discovered. The need of turning to Dean Silva had
damaged his opinion of his own wisdom. It was the final
affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer to
teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark
face was blank, and the wrinkles which deepened across that
mask may have been sorrow, may have been fear. . . . Nor
is it known how, through the secure and uninvaded years, he

ARROWS MITH

133

had regarded his wife’s crucifix, which Silva had spied on their
bureau — a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with gilded shells.

Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her
on treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved,
but she remained in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb
wondered: Are these doctors deceiving us? Is it really cancer,
which by Their mystic craft They are concealing from me who
know naught?

Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by
weary night he had depended, he fretted over his daughters,
despaired at their noisy piano-practice, their inability to man¬
age the slattern maid. When they had gone to bed he sat
alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, not reading. He was
bewildered. His haughty self was like a robber baron fallen
into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load,
the proud eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword
hand chopped off, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed
wrist.

It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora
on the street in Zenith.

He did not look back when they had passed him, but all
that afternoon he brooded on them. “That girl, maybe it
was she that stole Martin from me — from science! No! He
was right. One sees what happens to the fools like me!”

On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheat-
sylvania, singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers’
agency.

The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been
a county superintendent of schools. He was not much inter¬
ested. Gottlieb lost his temper: “Do you make an endeavor
to find positions for teachers, or do you merely send out cir¬
culars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my record?
Do you know who I am?”

The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all
right! I didn’t when I first wrote you, but — You seem to
have a good record as a laboratory man, though I don’t see
that you’ve produced anything of the slightest use in medi¬
cine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you nor
nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil mag¬
nate, has decided to found a university that for plant and en¬
dowment and individuality will beat anything that’s ever been
pulled off in education — biggest gymnasium in the world, with

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ARROWS MITH

an ex-New York Giant for baseball coach! We thought maybe
we might work you in on the bacteriology or the physiology —
I guess you could manage to teach that, too, if you boned up
on it. But we’ve been making some inquiries. From some
good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that
you’re not to be trusted with a position of real responsibility.
Why, they fired you for general incompetence! But now that
you’ve had your lesson — Do you think you’d be competent
to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth University?”

Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and
as all his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry
voice, the whole scene was very funny indeed to the cackling
bookkeeper and the girl stenographers. When he went from
that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly, without purpose, and
in his eyes were senile tears.

CHAPTER XIII

No one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily
than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceuti¬
cal firms, particularly Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of
Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company was an old and ethical
house which dealt only with reputable doctors — or practically
only with reputable doctors. It furnished excellent antitoxins
for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the purest of official
preparations, with the plainest and most official-looking labels
on the swaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gottlieb had as¬
serted that they produced doubtful vaccines, yet he returned
from Chicago to write to Dawson Hunziker that he was no
longer interested in teaching, and he would be willing to work
for them on half time if he might use their laboratories, on
possibly important research, for the rest of the day.

When the letter had gone he sat mumbling. He was cer¬
tainly not altogether sane. “Education! Biggest gymnasium
in the world! Incapable of responsibility. Teaching I can do
no more. But Hunziker will laugh at me. I haf told the
truth about him and I shall haf to — Dear Gott, what shall
I do?”

Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered
at him from doorways, hope glided.

The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third
irascible burring he took up the receiver and grumbled, “Yes,
yes, vot iss it?”

A twanging nonchalant voice: “This M. C. Gottlieb?”

“This is Dr. Gottlieb!”

“Well, I guess you’re the party. Hola wire. Long distance
wants yuh.”

Then, “Professor Gottlieb? This is Dawson Hunziker speak¬
ing. From Pittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted
to have you join our staff.”

“I— But—”

“I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses —
oh, we read the newspaper clippings very efficiently! — but we

135

ARROW SMITH

136

feel that when you come to us and understand the Spirit of
the Old Firm better, you’ll be enthusiastic. I hope, by the
way, I’m not interrupting something.”

Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and
blue drawing-room of his Sewickley home", Hunziker spoke to
Max Gottlieb sitting in his patched easy chair, and Gottlieb
grated, with a forlorn effort at dignity:

“No, it iss all right.”

“Well — we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a
year, for a starter, and we shan’t worry about the half-time
arrangement. We’ll give you all the space and technicians and
material you need, and you just go ahead and ignore us, and
work out whatever seems important to you. Our only request
is that if you do find any serums which are of real value to
the world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them,
and if we lose money on ’em, it doesn’t matter. We like to
make money, if we can do it honestly, but our chief purpose
is to serve mankind. Of course if the serums pay, we shall be
only too delighted to give you a generous commission. Now
about practical details — ”

Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had
a religious-seeming custom.

Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It
was very much like prayer, though certainly there was no
formal invocation, no consciousness of a Supreme Being —
other than Max Gottlieb. This night, as he knelt, with the
wrinkles softening in his drawn face, he meditated, “I was
asinine that I should ever scold the commercialists! This
salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much
more aut’entic the worst counter-jumper than frightened pro¬
fessors! Fine dieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles!
Du Heiliger!”

But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.

In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company
published full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined
in type, announcing that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the

ARROWSMITH 137

most distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their
staff.

In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, “That’s
what becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem
to grin.”

In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir
David Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, “How could old Max
have gone over to that damned pill-pedler? Why didn’t he
come to us? Oh, well, if he didn’t want to — Voila! He is
dead.”

In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young
doctor protested to his wife, “Of all the people in the world!

I wouldn’t have believed it! Max Gottlieb falling for those
crooks!”

“I don’t care!” said his wife. “If he’s gone into business,
he had some good reason for it. I told you, I’d leave you
for — ”

“Oh, well,” sighingly, “give and forgive. I learned a lot
from Gottlieb and I’m grateful for — God, Leora, I wish he
hadn’t gone wrong!”

And Max Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-
moving wife, was arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging
a shabby wicker bag, an immigrant bundle, and a Bond Street
dressing-case. From the train he had stared up at the valiant
cliffs, down to the smoke- tinged splendor of the river, and
his heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not the flat
land and flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance
every dingy taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched
forth a conqueror.

In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such labo¬
ratories as he had never planned, and instead of student as¬
sistants he had an expert who himself had taught bacteri¬
ology, as well as three swift technicians, one of them German-
trained. He was received with acclaim in the private omce of
Hunziker, which was remarkably like a minor cathedral. Hun¬
ziker was bald and business-like as to skull but tortoise-
spectacled and sentimental of eye. He stood up at his Jaco¬
bean desk, gave Gottlieb a Havana cigar, and told him that
they had awaited him pantingly.

138

ARROWSMITH

In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of
competent young chemists and biologists who treated him with
reverence. He liked them. If they talked too much of money
— of how much this new tincture of cinchona ought to sell,
and how soon their salaries would be increased — yet they were
free of the careful pomposities of college instructors. As a
youngster, the cap-tilted young Max had been a laughing man,
and now in gusty arguments his laughter came back.

His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an ex¬
cellent piano teacher; the boy Robert entered college that
autumn; they had a spacious though decrepit house; the relief
from the droning and the annually repeated, inevitable routine
of the classroom was exhilarating; and Gottlieb had never
in his life worked so well. He was unconscious of everything
outside of his laboratory and a few theaters and concert-halls.

Six months passed before he realized that the young tech¬
nical experts resented what he considered his jolly thrusts at
their commercialism. They were tired of his mathematical en¬
thusiasms and some of them viewed him as an old bore, mut¬
tered of him as a Jew. He was hurt, for he liked to be merry
with fellow workers. He began to ask questions and to explore
the Hunziker building. He had seen nothing of it save his
laboratory, a corridor or two, the dining-room, and Hunziker’s
office.

However abstracted and impractical, Gottlieb would have
made an excellent Sherlock Holmes — if anybody who would
have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes would have been
willing to be a detective. His mind burned through appear¬
ances to actuality. He discovered now that the Dawson
Hunziker Company was quite all he had asserted in earlier
days. They did make excellent antitoxins and ethical prepara¬
tions, but they were also producing a new “cancer remedy”
manufactured from the orchid, pontifically recommended and
possessing all the value of mud. And to various billboard¬
advertising beauty companies they sold millions of bottles of
a complexion-cream guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian
guide as lily-fair as the angels. This treasure cost six cents
a bottle to make and a dollar over the counter, and the name
of Dawson Hunziker was never connected with it.

It was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his master-
work after twenty years of seeking. He produced antitoxin in
the test-tube, which meant that it would be possible to im-

ARROWSMITH

139

munize against certain diseases without tediously making sera
by the inoculation of animals. It was a revolution, the revolu¬
tion, in immunology ... if he was right.

He revealed it at a dinner for which Hunziker had captured
a general, a college president, and a pioneer aviator. It was
an expansive dinner, with admirable hock, the first decent
German wine Gottlieb had drunk in years. He twirled the
slender green glass affectionately; he came out of his dreams
and became excited, gay, demanding. They applauded him
and for an hour he was a Great Scientist. Of them all,
Hunziker was most generous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered
if some one bad not tricked this good bald man into intrigues
with the beautifiers.

Hunziker summoned him to the office next day. Hunziker
did his summoning very well indeed (unless it happened to be
merely a stenographer). He sent a glossy morning-coated
male secretary, who presented Mr. Hunziker’s compliments t»
the much less glossy Dr. Gottlieb, and hinted with the delicacy
of a lilac bud that if it was quite altogether convenient, if it
would not in the least interfere with Dr. Gottlieb’s experiments,
Mr. Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office at a
quarter after three.

When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary
out of existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.

“I lay awake half the night thinking about your discovery,
Dr. Gottlieb. I’ve been talking to the technical director and
sales-manager and we feel it’s the time to strike. We’ll patent
your method of synthesizing antibodies and immediately put
them on the market in large quantities, with a great big ad¬
vertising campaign — you know — not circus it, of course —
strictly high-class ethical advertising. We’ll start with anti¬
diphtheria serum. By the way, when you receive your next
check you’ll find we’ve raised your honorarium to seven thou¬
sand a year.” Hunziker was a large purring pussy, now, and
Gottlieb death-still. “Need I say, my dear fellow, that if
there’s the demand I anticipate, you will have exceedingly large
commissions coming!”

Hunziker leaned back with a manner of “How’s that for
glory, my boy?”

Gottlieb spoke nervously: “I do not approve of patenting
serological processes. They should be open to all laboratories.
And I am strongly against premature production or even an-

ARROWSMITH

140

nouncement. I think I am right, but I must check my tech¬
nique, perhaps improve it — be sure. Then, I should think,
there should be no objection to market production, but in ve-ry
small quantities and in fair competition with others, not under
patents, as if this was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas
tradings!”

“My dear fellow, I quite sympathize. Personally I should
like nothing so much as to spend my whole life in just pro¬
ducing one priceless scientific discovery, without consideration
of mere profit. But we have our duty toward the stockholders
of the Dawson Hunziker Company to make money for them.
Do you realize that they have — and many of them are poor
widows and orphans — invested their Little All in our stock,
and that we must keep faith? I am helpless; I am but their
Humble Servant. And on the other side: I think we’ve treated
you rather well, Dr. Gottlieb, and we’ve given you complete
freedom. And we intend to go on treating you well! Why,
man, you’ll be rich; you’ll be one of us! I don’t like to make
any demands, but on this point it’s my duty to insist, and I
shall expect you at the earliest possible moment to start manu¬
facturing — ”

Gottlieb was sixty-two. The defeat at Winnemac had done
something to his courage. . . . And he had no contract with
Hunziker.

He protested shakily, but as he crawled back to his labora¬
tory it seemed impossible for him to leave this sanctuary and
face the murderous brawling world, and quite as impossible to
tolerate a cheapened and ineffective imitation of his antitoxin.
He began, that hour, a sordid strategy which his old proud
self would have called inconceivable; he began to equivocate,
to put off announcement and production till he should have
“cleared up a few points,” while week on week Hunziker be¬
came more threatening. Meantime he prepared for disaster.
He moved his family to a smaller house, and gave up every
luxury, even smoking.

Among his economies was the reduction of his son’s allow¬
ance.

Robert was a square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arro¬
gant where there seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed
for by the anemic, milky sort of girls, yet ever supercilious
to them. While his father was alternately proud and amiably
sardonic about his own Jewish blood, the boy conveyed to his

ARROWSMITH

141

classmates in college that he was from pure and probably noble
German stock. He was welcomed, or half welcomed, in a
motoring, poker-playing, country-club set, and he had to have
more money. Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his desk.
He who ridiculed conventional honor had the honor, as he had
the pride, of a savage old squire. A new misery stained his
incessant bitterness at having to deceive Hunziker. He faced
Robert with, “My boy, did you take the money from my desk?”

Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose,
the red-veined rage of his sunken eyes. Robert spluttered,
then shouted:

“Yes, I did! And I’ve got to have some more! I’ve got to
get some clothes and stuff. It’s your fault. You bring me up
to train with a lot of fellows that have all the cash in the
world, and then you expect me to dress like a hobo!”

“Stealing — ”

“Rats! What’s stealing! You’re always making fun of
these preachers that talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty
and all those words that’ve been used so much they don’t mean
a darn’ thing and — I don’t care! Daws Hunziker, the old
man’s son, he told me his dad said you could be a million¬
aire, and then you keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick —
Let me tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a
couple of dollars almost every week and — I’m tired of it!
If you’re going to keep me in rags, I’m going to cut out col¬
lege!”

Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not
know, all the next fortnight, what his son was going to do,
what himself was going to do.

Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the
cemetery did they realize her passing, his wife died, and the
next week his oldest daughter ran off with a worthless laugh¬
ing fellow who lived by gambling.

Gottlieb sat alone. Over and over he read the Book of Job.
“Truly the Lord hath smitten me and my house,” he whis¬
pered. When Robert came in, mumbling that he would be
good, the old man lifted to him a blind face, unhearing. But
as he repeated the fables of his fathers it did not occur to him
to believe them, or to stoop in fear before their God of Wrath
— or to gain ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.

He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory. His
experiments were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no

142

ARRO WSMITH

change save that he did not lunch in hall. He walked blocks
away, to a vile restaurant at which he could save thirty cents
a day.

Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him,
Miriam emerged.

She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no
way comely save for her tender mouth. She had always been
proud of her father, understanding the mysterious and un¬
reasoning compulsions of his science, but she had been in awe
till now, when he walked heavily and spoke rarely. She
dropped her piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied the
cook-book, and prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he
loved. Her regret was that she had never learned German, for
he dropped now and then into the speech of his boyhood.

He eyed her, and at length: “So! One is with me. Could
you endure the poverty if I went away — to teach chemistry
in a high school ! ”

“Yes. Of course. Maybe I could play the piano in a movie
theater.”

He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when
Dawson Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demand¬
ing, “Now look here. We’ve fussed long enough. We got to
put your stuff on the market,” then Gottlieb answered, “No.
If you wait till I have done all I can — maybe one year, prob¬
ably three — you shall have it. But not till I am sure. No.”

Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.

Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the
McGurk Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to
him.

Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but
he considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the
soundest and freest organization for pure scientific research
in the country, and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory
in which good scientists might spend eternity in happy and
thoroughly impractical research, he would have devised it in
the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its
director should have called on him.

Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all
visible spots save his nose and temples and the palms of his

143

ARROW SMITH

hands, short but passionately whiskered, like a Scotch terrier.
Yet they were not comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of
dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an earnest trot,
his voice a piping solemnity.

“Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your
papers at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have
hitherto failed to have an introduction to you.”

Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed. _

Tubbs looked at the assistants, like a plotter in a political
play, and hinted, “May we have a talk — ’’

Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of
sidetracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs
urged.!

“It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that
you are on the eve of your most significant discovery. _ We
all wondered, when you left academic work, at your decision
to enter the commercial field. We wished that you had cared

to come to us.” , , ,, , _

“You would have taken me in? I needn t at all have come

here?” , . •

“Naturally! Now from what we hear, you are not giving

your attention to the commercial side of things and that
tempts us to wonder whether you could be persuaded to join
us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a tram and ran down
here We should be delighted to have you become a member
of the institute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology
and Immunology. Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the
advancement of science. You would, of course have absolute
freedom as to what researches you thought it best to pursue,
and I think we could provide as good assistance and materia
as would be obtainable anywhere in the world. In re§a™
salary— permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt
as mv train leaves in one hour— I don’t suppose we could equal
the doubtless large emolument which the Hunziker people are
able to pay you, but we can go to ten thousand dollars a

y6“Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit’ you
in New York one week from to-day. You see, said o ,
“I haf no contract here!”

CHAPTER XIV

All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long
undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no
barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city,
and the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.

Martin cried to Leora, “I feel as if all the Zenith dust and
hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real
man’s country. Frontier. Opportunity. America!”

From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he
watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit
was part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the
impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.

“If you’re going driving, don’t forget that supper is six
o’clock sharp,” Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.

On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted,
“Be back by six. Supper at six o’clock sharp.”

Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country school¬
master skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled,
“Say, you folks better not forget to be back at six o’clock for
supper or the Old Man’ll have a fit. He’ll expect you for sup¬
per at six o’clock sharp, and when he says six o’clock sharp,
he means six o’clock sharp, and not five minutes past six!”

“Now that,” observed Leora, “is funny, because in my
twenty-two years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different
times when supper was as late as seven minutes after six.
Let’s get out of this, Sandy. ... I wonder were we so wise to
live with the family and save money?”

Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits
of Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert
Tozer, and through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing:
“Better be home by six.”

Martin would be heroic. “We’ll by golly get back when we’re
by golly good and ready!” he said to Leora; but on them both
was the cumulative dread of the fussing voices, beyond every
breezy prospect was the order, “Be back at six sharp”; and they
whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes to six, as Mr. Tozer was

144

ARROWS MITH 14S

returning from the creamery, full thirty seconds later than
usual.

“Glad to see you among us,” he said. “Hustle now and get
that horse in the livery stable. Supper’s at six — sharp!”

Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he
announced at the supper-table:

“We had a bully drive. I’m going to like it here. Well, I’ve
loafed for a day and a half, and now I’ve got to get busy. First
thing is, I must find a location for my office. What is there
vacant, Father Tozer?”

Mrs. Tozer said brightly, “Oh, I have such a nice idea,
Martin. Why can’t we fix up an office for you out in the
barn? It’d be so handy to the house, for you to get to meals
on time, and you could keep an eye on the house if the girl was
out and Ory and I went out visiting or to the Embroidery
Circle.”

“In the barn!”

“Why, yes, in the old harness room. It’s partly ceiled, and
we could put in some nice tar paper or even beaver board.”

“Mother Tozer, what the dickens do you think I’m planning
to do? I’m not a hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking
for a place to put his birds’ eggs! I was thinking of opening
an office as a physician!”

Bert made it all easy: “Yuh, but you aren’t much of a
physician yet. You’re just getting your toes in.”

“I’m one hell of a good physician! Excuse me for cussing.
Mother Tozer, but— Why, nights in the hospital, I’ve held
hundreds of lives in my hand! I intend — ”

“Look here, Mart,” said Bertie. “As we’re putting up the
money — I don’t want to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar
is a dollar — if we furnish the dough, we’ve got to decide the
best way to spend it.”

Mr. Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, “That’s so.
No sense taking a risk, with the blame’ farmers demanding
all the money they can get for their wheat and cream, and then
deliberately going to work and not paying the interest on their
loans. I swear, it don’t hardly pay to invest in mortgages any
longer. No sense putting on lugs. Stands to reason you can
look at a fellow’s sore throat or prescribe for an ear-ache just
as well in a nice simple little office as in some fool place all
fixed up like a Moorhead saloon. Mother will see you have
a comfortable corner in the barn — ”

ARROWSMITH

146

Leora intruded: “Look here, Papa. I want you to lend us
one thousand dollars, outright, to use as we see fit.” The sen¬
sation was immense. “We’ll pay you six per cent — no, we
won’t; we’ll pay you five; that’s enough.”

“And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!” Bert quav¬
ered.

“Five’s enough. And we want our own say, absolute, as to
how we use it — to fit up an office or anything else.”

Mr. Tozer began, “That’s a foolish way to — ”

Bert took it away from him: “Ory, you’re crazy! I suppose
we’ll have to lend you some money, but you’ll blame well come
to us for it from time to time, and you’ll blame well take our
advice — ”

Leora rose. “Either you do what I say, just exactly what I
say, or Mart and I take the first train and go back to Zenith,
and I mean it! Plenty of places open for him there, with a
big salary, so we won’t have to be dependent on anybody!”

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like
all the rest of it. Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up
and pack; once Martin and she stood waving their napkins as
they shook their fists, the general composition remarkably like
the Laocoon.

Leora won.

They settled down to the most solacing fussing.

“Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?” asked Mr.
Tozer.

“No sense leaving it there — paying two bits a day storage!”
fumed Bert.

“I got it up this morning,” said Martin.

“Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning,” agreed
Mrs. Tozer.

“You had it brought? Didn’t you bring it up yourself?”
agonized Mr. Tozer.

“No. I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up
for me,” said Martin.

“Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well’ve put it on a
wheelbarrow and brought it up yourself and saved a quarter!”
said Bert.

“But a doctor has to keep his dignity,” said Leora.

“Dignity, rats! Blame sight more dignified to be seen
shoving a wheelbarrow than smoking them dirty cigarettes all
the time!”

ARROWSMITH

147

“Well, anyway — Where’d you put it?” asked Mr. Tozer.
“It’s up in our room,” said Martin.

“Where’d you think we better put it when it’s unpacked?
The attic is awful’ full,” Mr. Tozer submitted to Mrs. Tozer.
“Oh, I think Martin could get it in there.”

“Why couldn’t he put it in the barn?”

“Oh, not a nice new trunk like that!”

“What’s the matter with the barn?” said Bert. “It’s all
nice and dry. Seems a shame to waste all that good space in
the barn, now that you’ve gone and decided he mustn t have
his dear little office there!”

“Bertie,” from Leora, “I know what we’ll do. You
seem to have the barn on your brain. You move your old bank
there, and Martin’ll take the bank building for his office.”
“That’s entirely different — ”

“Now there’s no sense you two showing off and trying to be
smart,” protested Mr. Tozer. “Do you ever hear your mother
and I scrapping and fussing like that? When do you think
you’ll have your trunk unpacked, Mart?” Mr. Tozer could
consider barns and he could consider trunks but his was not a
brain to grasp two such complicated matters at the same time.
“I can get it unpacked to-night, if it makes any difference — ”
“Well, I don’t suppose it really makes any special difference,
but when you start to do a thing — ”

“Oh, what difference does it make whether he — ”

“If he’s going to look for an office, instead of moving right
into the barn, he can’t take a month of Sundays getting un¬
packed and — ”

“Oh, good Lord, I’ll get it done to-night—”

“And I think we can get it in the attic — ”

“I tell you it’s jam full already—”

“We’ll go take a look at it after supper—” _

“Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in —
Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself
screaming. The free and virile land was leagues away and for
years forgotten.

To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of dis¬
cussion brightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that
office-finding was the only thing the Tozers mentioned. They

ARROWSMITH

went thoroughly into every moment of Martin’s day; they
commented on his digestion, his mail, his walks, his shoes that
needed cobbling, and whether he had yet taken them to the
farmer-trapper-cobbler, and how much the cobbling ought to
cost, and the presumable theology, politics, and marital rela¬
tions of the cobbler.)

Mr. Tozer had from the first known the perfect office. The
Norbloms lived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew
that the Norbloms were thinking of moving. There was indeed
nothing that was happening or likely to happen in Wheatsyl-
vania which Mr. Tozer did not know and explain. Mrs. Nor-
blom was tired of keeping house, and she wanted to go to Mrs.
Beeson’s boarding house (to the front room, on the right as
you went along the up-stairs hall, the room with the plaster
walls and the nice little stove that Mrs. Beeson bought from
Otto Krag for seven dollars and thirty-five cents — no, seven
and a quarter it was).

They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that
“it might be nice for the Doctor to locate over the store, if the
Norbloms were thinking of making any change — ”

The Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached,
cautious, Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they “didn’t
know — of course it was the finest location in town — ” Mr.
Norblom admitted that if, against all probability, they ever
considered moving, they would probably ask twenty-five dollars
a month for the flat, unfurnished.

Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craft¬
ily joyful as any Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Wash¬
ington or London :

“Fine! Fine! We made him commit himself! Twenty-
five, he says. That means, when the time’s ripe, we’ll offer
him eighteen and close for twenty-one-seventy-five. If we just
handle him careful, and give him time to go see Mrs. Beeson
and fix up about boarding with her, we’ll have him just where
we want him!”

“Oh, if the Norbloms can’t make up their minds, then let’s
try something else,” said Martin. “There’s a couple of vacant
rooms behind the Eagle office.”

“What? Go chasing around, after we’ve given the Norbloms
reason to think we’re serious, and make enemies of ’em for life?
Now that would be a fine way to start building up a practise,
wouldn’t it! And I must say I wouldn’t blame the Norbloms

ARROWSMITH

149

one bit for getting wild if you let ’em down like that. This
ain’t Zenith, where you can go yelling around expecting to
get things done in two minutes!”

Through a fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over de¬
ciding to do what they had long ago decided to do, Martin
waited, unable to begin work. Until he should open a certified
and recognizable office, most of the village did not regard him
as a competent physician but as “that son-in-law of Andy
Tozer’s.” In the fortnight he was called only once: for the
sick-headache of Miss Agnes Ingleblad, aunt and housekeeper
of Alec Ingleblad the barber. He was delighted, till Bert Tozer
explained :

“Oh, so she called you in, eh? She’s always doctorin’ around.
There ain’t a thing the matter with her, but she’s always try¬
ing out the latest stunt. Last time it was a fellow that come
through here selling pills and liniments out of a Ford, and the
time before that it was a faith-healer, crazy loon up here at
Dutchman’s Forge, and then for quite a spell she doctored with
an osteopath in Leopolis — though I tell you there’s something
to this osteopathy — they cure a lot of folks that you regular
docs can’t seem to find out what’s the matter with ’em, don’t
you think so?”

Martin remarked that he did not think so.

“Oh, you docs!” Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for
Bert could be very joky and bright. “You’re all alike, es¬
pecially when you’re just out of school and think you know it
all. You can’t see any good in chiropractic or electric belts or
bone-setters or anything, because they take so many good
dollars away from you.”

Then behold the Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once infuri¬
ated Angus Duer and Irving Watters by his sarcasm on medical
standards upholding to a lewdly grinning Bert Tozer the benev¬
olence and scientific knowledge of all doctors; proclaiming that
no medicine had ever (at least by any Winnemac graduate)
been prescribed in vain nor any operation needlessly performed.

He saw a good deal of Bert now. He sat about the bank,
hoping to be called on a case, his fingers itching for bandages.
Ada Quist came in with frequency and Bert laid aside his figur¬
ing to be coy with her:

“You got to be careful what you even think about, when the
doc is here, Ade. He’s been telling me what a whale of a lot
of neurology and all that mind-reading stuff he knows. How

150

ARROWSMITH

about it, Mart? I’m getting so scared that I’ve changed the
combination on the safe.”

“Heh!” said Ada. “He may fool some folks but he can’t
fool me. Anybody can learn things in books, but when it
comes to practising ’em — Let me tell you, Mart, if you ever
have one-tenth of the savvy that old Dr. Winter of Leopolis
has, you’ll live longer than I expect!”

Together they pointed out that for a person who felt his
Zenith training had made him so “gosh-awful’ smart that he
sticks up his nose at us poor hicks of dirt-farmers,” Martin’s
scarf was rather badly tied.

All of his own wit and some of Ada’s Bert repeated at the
supper table.

“You oughtn’t to ride the boy so hard. Still, that was pretty
cute about the necktie — I guess Mart does think he’s some pun-
kins,” chuckled Mr. Tozer.

Leora took Martin aside after supper. “Darlin’, can you
stand it? We’ll have our own house, soon as we can. Or
shall we vamoose?”

“I’m by golly going to stand it!”

“Um. Maybe. Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful —
they’ll hang you.”

He ambled to the front porch. He determined to view the
rooms behind the Eagle office. Without a retreat in which to be
safe from Bert he could not endure another week. He could
not wait for the Norbloms to make up their minds, though they
had become to him dread and eternal figures whose enmity
would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing this Wheatsyl-
vania which was the only perceptible world.

He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramp¬
ing the plank walk before the house, hesitating and peering at
him. The man was one Wise, a Russian Jew known to the vil¬
lage as “Wise the Polack.” In his shack near the railroad he
sold silver stock and motor-factory stock, bought and sold
farmlands and horses and muskrat hides. He called out,
“That you, Doc?”

“Yup!”

Martin was excited. A patient!

“Say, I wish you’d walk down a ways with me. Couple
things I’d like to talk to you about. Or say, come on over to my
place and sample some new cigars I’ve got.” He emphasized

ARROWSMITH 151

the word “cigars.” North Dakota was, like Mohalis, theoret¬
ically dry.

Martin was pleased. He had been sober and industrious
so long now!

Wise’s shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half
a block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track
between it and open wheat country. It was lined with pine,
pleasant-smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke. Wise
winked — he was a confidential, untrustworthy wisp of a man
— and murmured, “Think you could stand a little jolt of first-
class Kentucky bourbon?”

“Well, I wouldn’t get violent about it.”

Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a
warped drawer of his desk brought up a bottle out of which
they both drank, wiping the mouth of the bottle with circling
palms. Then Wise, abruptly:

“Look here, Doc. You’re not like these hicks; you under¬
stand that sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked busi¬
ness he didn’t intend to. Well, make a long story short, I guess
I’ve sold too much mining stock, and they’ll be coming down
on me. I’ve got to be moving — curse it — hoped I could stay
settled for couple of years, this time. Well, I hear you’re look¬
ing for an office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Two
rooms at the back besides this one. I’ll rent it to you, furni¬
ture and the whole shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month,
if you’ll pay me one year in advance. Oh, this ain’t phony.
Your brother-in-law knows all about my ownership.”

Martin tried to be very business-like. Was he not a young
doctor who would soon be investing money, one of the most
Substantial Citizens in Wheatsyl vania? He returned home,
and under the parlor lamp, with its green daisies on pink glass,
the Tozers listened acutely, Bert stooping forward with open
mouth.

“You’d be safe renting it for a year, but that ain’t the point, ’
said Bert.

“It certainly isn’t! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that
they’ve almost made up their minds to let you have their place?
Make me a fool, after all the trouble I’ve taken?” groaned Mr.
Tozer.

They went over it and over it till almost ten o’clock, but
Martin was resolute, and the next day he rented Wise’s shack.

152 ARROWSMITH

For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own,
his and Leora’s.

In his pride of possession this was the most lordly building
on earth, and every rock and weed and doorknob was peculiar
and lovely. At sunset he sat on the back stoop (a very inter¬
esting and not too broken soap-box) and from the flamboyant
horizon the open country flowed across the thin band of the
railroad to his feet. Suddenly Leora was beside him, her arm
round his neck, and he hymned all the glory of their future:

“Know what I found in the kitchen here? A dandy old
auger, hardly rusty a bit, and I can take a box and make a
test-tube rack ... of my own!”

CHAPTER XV

With none of the profane observations on “medical pedlers”
which had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue
of the New Idea Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey
City. It was a handsome thing. On the glossy green cover,
in red and black, were the portraits of the president, a round
quippish man who loved all young physicians; the general
manager, a cadaverous scholarly man who surely gave all his
laborious nights and days to the advancement of science; and
the vice-president, Martin’s former preceptor, Dr. Roscoe
Geake, who had a lively, eye-glassed, forward-looking modern¬
ity all his own. The cover also contained, in surprisingly small
space, a quantity of poetic prose, and the inspiring promise:

Doctor, don’t be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why
YOU should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes
practise easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-class sup¬
plies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs
are within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea
Financial System: “Just a little down and the rest FREE — out of
the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!”

Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was
the challenge:

Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who
can touch the doctor — wise, heroic, uncontaminated _ by common
greed. Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith offer you
the most up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical
supply house.

The back cover, though it was less glorious with green and
red, was equally arousing. It presented illustrations of the
Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and of an electric cabinet,
with the demand:

Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for tonsil
removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? _ If so, you
are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguished

153

154

ARRO WSMITH

powers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and
losing a lot of big fees. Don’t you WANT to be a high-class prac¬
titioner? Here’s the Open Door.

The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful,
adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by the in¬
stallation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic Electro-
Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can increase
your income from a thousand to ten thousand annually and please
patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.

When the Great Call sounds. Doctor, and it’s time for you to face
your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and
tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up provi¬
sion for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your tribula¬
tions?

You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down
into the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the ebon-
cloaked Powers of Darkness for the lives of your patients, but that
heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained by
the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and the New Idea
Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small payment down, rest on
easiest terms known in history of medicine!

This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of
poetry was like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he
ordered a steel stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-
enameled mechanism with enchanting levers and gears which
transformed it from examining-chair to operating-table. He
yearned over the picture of a centrifuge while Leora was ad¬
miring the “stunning seven-piece Reception Room fumed oak
set, upholstered in genuine Barcelona Longware Leatherette,
will give your office the class and distinction of any high-grade
New York specialist’s.”

“Aw, let ’em sit on plain chairs,” Martin grunted.

In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for the
reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora
had lined it with pink fringed paper, became a noble instru¬
ment-cabinet. Till the examining-chair should arrive, Martin
would use Wise’s lumpy couch, and Leora busily covered it with
white oilcloth. Behind the front room of the tiny office-building
were two cubicles, formerly bedroom and kitchen. Martin
made them into consultation-room and laboratory. Whistling,
he sawed out racks for the glassware and turned the oven of
a discarded kerosene stove into a hot-air oven for sterilizing
glassware.

ARROWSMITH

155

“But understand, Lee, I’m not going to go monkeying with
any scientific research. I’m through with all that.”

Leora smiled innocently. While he worked she sat outside in
the long wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about
her ankles, but every quarter-hour she had to come in and
admire.

Mr. Tozer brought home a package at suppertime. The
family opened it, babbling. After supper Martin and Leora
hastened with the new treasure to the office and nailed it in
place. It was a plate-glass sign; on it in gold letters, “M.
Arrowsmith, M.D.” They looked up, arms about each other,
squealing softly, and in reverence he grunted, “There — by —
jiminy!”

They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers.
Along the railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clank¬
ing. The fireman waved to them from the engine, a brakeman
from the platform of the red caboose. After the train there was
silence but for the crickets and a distant frog.

“I’ve never been so happy,” he murmured.

He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case.
As he laid out the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shin¬
ing bistoury, the strong tenotome, the delicate curved needles.
With them was a dental forceps. Dad Silva had warned his
classes, “Don’t forget the country doctor often has to be not
only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce lawyer,
blacksmith, chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too
lily-handed for those trades, don’t get out of sight of a trolley
line and a beauty parlor.” And the first patient whom Martin
had in the new office, the second patient in Wheatsylvania,
was Nils Krag, the carpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth.
This was a week before the glass sign was up, and Martin
rejoiced to Leora, “Begun already! You’ll see ’em tumbling
in now.”

They did not see them tumbling in. For ten days Martin
tinkered at his hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and try¬
ing to look busy. His first joy passed into fretfulness, and
he could have yelped at the stillness, the inactivity.

Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way pre¬
paring to go home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish

156

ARRO WSMITH

farmer who grumbled, “Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my
thumb and it’s all swole.” To Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith
General Hospital with its out-patient clinic treating hundreds
a day, the dressing of a hand had been less important than bor¬
rowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania it
was a hectic operation, and the farmer a person remark¬
able and very charming. Martin shook his left hand violently
and burbled, “Now if there’s anything, you just ’phone me —
you just ’phone me.”

There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient
to justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the
thing about which they whispered at night: the purchase of a
motor car for his country calls.

They had seen the car at Frazier’s store.

It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy
motor, and springs made by a blacksmith who had never made
springs before. Next to the chugging of the gas engine at the
creamery, the most familiar sound in Wheatsylvania was Fra¬
zier’s closing the door of his Ford. He banged it flatly at the
store, and usually he had to shut it thrice again before he
reached home.

But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought
the car and three new tires and a horn, it was the most
impressive vehicle on earth. It was their own; they could go
when and where they wished.

During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned
to drive the Ford station wagon, but it was Leora’s first venture.
Bert had given her so many directions that she had refused to
drive the family Overland. When she first sat at the steering
wheel, when she moved the hand-throttle with her little finger
and felt in her own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her
to go as fast as she might desire (within distinct limits), she
transcended human strength, she felt that she could fly’ like
the wild goose — and then in a stretch of sand she killed the
engine.

Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride
with him was to sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting
for death. Apparently he accelerated for corners, to make them
more interesting. The sight of anything on the road ahead,
from another motor to a yellow pup, stirred in him a frenzy
which could be stilled only by going up and passing it. The
village adored, “The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right.”

ARROW SMITH

157

They waited, with amiable interest, to hear that he had been
killed. It is possible that half of the first dozen patients who
drifted into his office came because of awe at his driving . . .
the rest because there was nothing serious the matter, and he
was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at Groningen.

With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.

When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsyl-
vania it is difficult not to meet every one on the street every
day), they glared. Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.

Pete conducted what he called a “drug store,” devoted to
the sale of candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper,
magazines, washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete
would have starved if he had not been postmaster also. He
alleged that he was a licensed pharmacist but he so mangled
prescriptions that Martin burst into the store and addressed
him piously.

“You young docs make me sick,” said Pete. “I was putting
up prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc
that used to be here sent everything to me. My way o’ doing
things suits me, and I don’t figure on changing it for you or any
other half-baked young string-bean.”

Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul,
overcrowd his tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills
and ointments, looking in a homesick way at the rarely used
test-tubes and the dust gathering on the bell glass of his micro¬
scope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms in whisper¬
ing, “This new doc here ain’t any good. You better stick to
Hesselink.”

So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the
telephone at the Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed
to it as though he were awaiting a love message.

A hoarse and shaky voice: “I want to speak to the doc¬
tor.”

“Yuh — yuh — ’S the doctor speaking.”

“This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis
road. My little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I

i58 ARROWSMITH

think maybe it is croup and she look awful and — Could you
come right away?”

“You bet. Be right there.”

Four miles — he would do it in eight minutes.

He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together,
while Leora beamed over the first night call. He furiously
cranked the Ford, banged and clattered past the station and
into the wheat prairie. When he had gone six miles by the
speedometer, slackening at each rural box to look for the
owner’s name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a
farm driveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight
on a heap of dented milk-cans, broken harvester wheels, cord-
wood, and bamboo fishing-poles. From the barn dashed a
woolly anomalous dog, barking viciously, leaping up at the
car.

A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window. “What
you want?” screamed a Scandinavian voice.

“This is The Doctor. Where does Henry Novak live?”

“Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?”

“No! Dr. Arrowsmith.”

“Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsyl vania? Um. Well,
you went right near his place. You yoost turn back one mile
and turn to the right by the brick schoolhouse, and it’s about
forty rods up the road — the house with a cement silo. Some¬
body sick by Henry’s?”

“Yuh — yuh — girl’s got croup — thanks — ”

“Yoost keep to the right. You can’t miss it.”

Probably no one who has listened to the dire “you can’t
miss it” has ever failed to miss it.

Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping-
block; he rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the
schoolhouse instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail
between pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surpris¬
ing fall of silence, cows were to be heard feeding, and a white
horse, startled in the darkness, raised its head to wonder at
him. He had to arouse the house with wild squawkings of
his horn, and an irate farmer who bellowed, “Who’s there?
I’ve got a shotgun;” sent him back to the country road.

It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when
he rushed into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep,
against the lamplight, a stooped man who called, “The Doc¬
tor? This is Novak.”

ARROWSMITH

i59

He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white
plastered walls and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed,
a straight chair, a chromo of St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-
lamp on a rickety stand broke the staring shininess of the
apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A heavy¬
shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her
wet red face, Novak urged:

“Don’t cry now; he’s here!” And to Martin: “The little
one is pretty bad but we done all we could for her. Last night
and to-night we steam her throat, and we put her here in our
own bedroom!”

Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips
and finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to
expel her breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed
up saliva dotted with grayish specks. Martin worried as he
took out his clinical thermometer and gave it a professional¬
looking shake.

It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably
diphtheria. No time now for bacteriological examination, for
cultures and leisurely precision. Silva the healer bulked in the
room, crowding out Gottlieb the inhuman perfectionist. Mar¬
tin leaned nervously over the child on the tousled bed, absent-
mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felt helpless
without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus
Duer’s sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone coun¬
try doctor.

He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He
would use diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not
obtain it from Pete Yeska’s in Wheatsylvania.

Leopolis?

“Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on
the ’phone,” he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive.
He pictured Blassner driving through the night, respectfully
bringing the antitoxin to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed
into the farm-line telephone, in the dining-room, Martin
waited — waited — staring at the child; Mrs. Novak waited for
him to do miracles; the child’s tossing and hoarse gasping be¬
came horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale
yellow woodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too
late for anything short of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should
he operate; cut into the wind-pipe that she might breathe?
He stood and worried ; he drowned in sleepiness and shook him-

i6o

ARROWSMITH

self awake. He had to do something, with the mother kneeling
there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.

“Get some hot cloths — towels, napkins — and keep ’em around
her neck. I wish to God he’d get that telephone call!” he
fretted.

As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in
the hot cloths, Novak appeared with a blank “Nobody sleep¬
ing at the drug store, and Blassner’s house-line is out of order.”

“Then listen. I’m afraid this may be serious. I’ve got to
have antitoxin. Going to drive t’ Leopolis and get it. You keep
up these hot applications and — Wish we had an atomizer.
And room ought to be moister. Got ’n alcohol stove? Keep
some water boiling in here. No use of medicine. B’ right
back.”

He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven
minutes. Not once did he slow down for a cross-road. He
defied the curves, the roots thrusting out into the road, though
always one dark spot in his mind feared a blow-out and a
swerve. The speed, the casting away of all caution, wrought
in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be in the cool
air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak’s watching. In
his mind all the while was the page in Osier regarding diph¬
theria, the very picture of the words: “In severe cases the first
dose should be from 8,000 — ” No. Oh, yes: “ — from 10,000
to 15,000 units.”

He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for
antitQxin and for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race
with Death.

“I’m going to do it — going to pull it off and save that poor
kid!” he rejoiced.

He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignor¬
ing possible trains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw
sliding light on the rails, and brought up sharp. Past him, ten
feet from his front wheels, flung the Seattle Express like a fly¬
ing volcano. The fireman was stoking, and even in the thin
clearness of coming dawn the glow from the fire-box was ap¬
palling on the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantly the
apparition was gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling
on the little steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus’s dance
on the brake. “That was an awful’ close thing!” he muttered,
and thought of a widowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But
the vision of the Novak child, struggling for each terrible

ARROWSMITH

161

breath, overrode all else. “Hell! I’ve killed the engine!” he
groaned. He vaulted over the side, cranked the car, and dashed
into Leopolis.

To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people
was a metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it
was a tiny graveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low
shops desolate as huts. He found one place astir ; in the bleak
office of the Dakota Hotel the night clerk was playing poker
with the ’bus-driver and the town policeman.

They wondered at his hysterical entrance.

“Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from
diphtheria. Where’s Blassner live? Jump in my car and show
me.”

The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open
over a collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute.
He guided Martin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the
door, then, standing with his lean and bristly visage upraised in
the cold early light, he bawled, “Ed! Hey, you, Ed! Come
out of it!”

Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window. To him,
death and furious doctors had small novelty. While he drew
on his trousers and coat he was to be heard discoursing to his
drowsy wife on the woes of druggists and the desirability of
moving to Los Angeles and going into real estate. But he did
have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, and sixteen minutes after
Martin’s escape from being killed by a train he was speeding to
Henry Novak’s.

The child was still alive when he came bruskly into the
house.

All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted
“Thank God!” and angrily called for hot water. He was no
longer the embarrassed cub doctor but the wise and heroic
physician who had won the Race with Death, and in the peasant
eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry’s nervous obedience, he read his
power.

Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the
antitoxin, and stood expectant.

The child’s breathing did not at first vary, as she choked
in the labor of expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, a

ARRO WSMITH

162

struggle in which her face blackened, and she was still. Martin
peered, incredulous. Slowly the Novaks began to glower,
shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knew the child was
gone. v

In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to
Martin. He had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to
another, quite cheerfully, “Well, fifty-seven has just passed
out.” Now he raged with desire to do the impossible. She
couldn’t be dead. He’d do something — All the while he was
groaning, “I should’ve operated — I should have.” So insistent
was the thought that for a time he did not realize that Mrs.
Novak was clamoring, “She is dead? Dead?”

He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.

“You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell
us, so we could call the priest!”

He crawled past her lamentations and the man’s sorrow,
and drove home, empty of heart.

“I shall never practise medicine again,” he reflected.

“I’m through,” he said to Leora. “I’m no good. I should
of operated. I can’t face people, when they know about it.
I’m through. I’ll go get a lab job — Dawson Hunziker or some
place.”

Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, “You’re
the most conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you’re
the only doctor that ever lost a patient? I know you did
everything you could.” But he went about next day torturing
himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer whined at supper,
“Henry Novak and his woman was in town to-day. They say
you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn’t you give your
mind to it and manage to cure her somehow? Ought to tried.
Kind of too bad, because the Novaks have a lot of influence
with all these Pole and Hunky farmers.”

After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin sud¬
denly drove to Leopolis.

From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr.
Adam Winter of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer
physician of Crynssen County, and to this sage he was fleeing.
As he drove he mocked furiously his melodramatic Race with
Death, and he came wearily into the dust-whirling Main Street.
Dr. Winter’s office was above a grocery, in a long “block” of
bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice — of tin. The

ARROWSMITH

163

darkness of the broad hallway was soothing after the prairie
heat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respect¬
ful patients had been received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man
with a sympathetic bass voice, before he was admitted to the
consultation-room.

The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once
used by Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was appar¬
ently done in a wash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric thera¬
peutic cabinet with more electrodes and pads than Martin had
ever seen.

He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, “Why,
Doctor, you did everything you could have and more too. Only
thing is, next time, in a crucial case, you better call some older
doctor in consultation — not that you need his advice, but it
makes a hit with the family, it divides the responsibility, and
keeps ’em from going around criticizing. I, uh, I frequently
have the honor of being called by some of my younger col¬
leagues. Just wait. I’ll ’phone the editor of the Gazette and
give him an item about the case.”

When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently.
He indicated his electric cabinet. “Got one of _ those things
yet? Ought to, my boy. Don’t know as I use it very often,
except with the cranks that haven’t anything the matter with
’em, but say, it would surprise you how it impresses folks.
Well, Doctor, welcome to Crynssen County. Married? Won t
you and your wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon?
Mrs. Winter will be real pleased to meet you. And if I ever
can be of service to you in a consultation — I only charge a
very little more than my regular fee, and it looks so well, talking

the case over with an older man.”

Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:

“You bet I’ll stick to it! At worst, I’ll never be as bad as

that snuffling old fee-splitter!” _

Two weeks after, the Wheatsylvania Eagle, a smeary four-
page rag, reported:

Our enterprising contemporary, the Leopolis Gazette, had as fol¬
lows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently

welcomed to our midst. .... , , . .

“Dr M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we
are informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam
Winter, by the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Val-

ARROWSMITH

164

ley, there being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appre¬
ciative of each other’s virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the
courage and enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scien¬
tific skill.

“Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of
near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near
death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save it by
himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist,
who had on hand a full and fresh supply. He drove out and back
in his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79
minutes.

“Fortunately our ever alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job
and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner’s bungalow on Red
River Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and hastened to
supply the doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the
child was already too low to be saved but it is by such incidents of
pluck and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the
medical profession one of our greatest blessings.”

Two hours after this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad
came in for another discussion of her non-existent ailments,
and two days later Henry Novak appeared, saying proudly:

“Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little
girl, but I guess I waited too long calling you. The woman
is awful’ cut up. She and I was reading that piece in the Eagle
about it. We showed it to the priest. Say, Doc, I wish you’d
take a look at my foot. I got kind of a rheumatic pain in the
ankle.”

CHAPTER XVI

When he had practised medicine in Wheatsylvania for one
year, Martin was an inconspicuous but not discouraged coun¬
try doctor. In summer Leora and he drove to the Pony River
for picnic suppers and a swim, very noisy, splashing, and im¬
modest; through autumn he went duck-hunting with Bert
Tozer, who became nearly tolerable when he stood at sunset
on a pass between two slews; and with winter isolating the
village in a sun-blank desert of snow, they had sleigh-rides,
card-parties, “sociables” at the churches.

When Martin’s flock turned to him for help, their need and
their patient obedience made them beautiful. Once or twice
he lost his temper with jovial villagers who bountifully ex¬
plained to him that he was less aged than he might have been;
once or twice he drank too much whisky at poker parties in
the back room of the Cooperative Store; but he was known as
reliable, skilful, and honest— and on the whole he was rather
less distinguished than Alec Ingleblad the barber, less prosper¬
ous than Nils Krag, the carpenter, and less interesting to his
neighbors than the Finnish garageman.

Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for
full twelve miles about.

He had gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farm¬
house a woman ran out shrieking that her baby had swallowed
a thimble and was choking to death. Martin had for surgical
kit a large jack-knife. He sharpened it on the farmer’s oil¬
stone, sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated on the baby’s
throat, and saved its life.

Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph,
and before this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingle¬
blad of her desire to be cured.

She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he
was called at midnight. He was spggily sleepy, after two
country drives on muddy roads, and in his torpor he gave her
an overdose of strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated her

165

1 66

ARRO WSMITH

that she decided to be well. It was so violent a change that
it made her more interesting than being an invalid — people had
of late taken remarkably small pleasure in her symptoms. She
went about praising Martin, and all the world said, “I hear
this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored
with that’s done her a mite of good.”

He gathered a practise small, sound, and in no way remark¬
able. Leora and he moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of
their own, with a parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled
stove on bright, new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a golden-
oak sideboard with a souvenir match-holder from Lake Minne¬
tonka. He bought a small Roentgen ray outfit; and he was
made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy to
long for his days of scientific research, which had never existed,
and Leora sighed:

“It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow
you out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be
a Pillar of the Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a
new husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sun¬
day School superintendent, you needn’t expect me to play the
organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not
learning his Golden Text.”

So did Martin stumble into respectability.

In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr.
Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency,
when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year
and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He re¬
turned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen of
America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting delega¬
tions to the convention, and the village of Groningen had
turned out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enor¬
mous pennant, “Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt.”

Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must
carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them,
and they were on sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece.
This, Bert explained to every one who came into the bank, was
exactly cost-price, which was within eleven cents of the truth.
He came galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first
to display a pennant.

ARROWSMITH 167

“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my
’bus,” protested Martin. “What’s the idea, anyway?”

“What’s the idea? To advertise your own town, of course!”

“What is there to advertise? Do you think you’re going to
make strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like
New York or Jimtown by hanging a dusty rag behind a second¬
hand tin lizzie?”

“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you,
Mart, if you don’t put on a banner I’ll see to it that everybody
in town notices it!”

While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the
world, or at least to several square miles of the world, that
Wheatsylvania was the “Wonder Town of Central N. D.,”
Martin’s clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Nor-
blom remarked, “I like to see a fellow have some public spirit
and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,” the citizenry
nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as a
worker of miracles.

He had intimates — the barber, the editor of the Eagle, the
garageman — to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the
crops, and with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too
intimate with them. It was the theory of Crynssen County that
it was quite all right for a young professional man to take a
timely drink providing he kept it secret and made up for it
by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with the
clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never
concealed.

If he was bored by the United Brethren minister’s discourse
on doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous
pay of pastors, it was not at all because he was a distant and
supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in
the garageman’s salty remarks on the art of remembering to
ante in poker.

Through all the state there were celebrated poker players,
rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt¬
sleeves, chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By
me,” and who delighted to plunder the gilded and condescend¬
ing traveling salesmen. When there was news of a “big game
on,” the county sports dropped in silently and went to work —

1 68

ARRO WSMITH

the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker from
Vanderheide’s Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red
fat man from Melody who had no known profession.

Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the
Valley), they played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the
office of the Wheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable ;
it was littered with robes and long whips, and the smell of
horses mingled with the reek of gasoline.

The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the
floor for an hour or two, but they were never less than four in
the game. The stink of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap
powerful cigars hovered about the table like a malign spirit;
the floor was scattered with stubs, matches, old cards, and
whisky bottles. Among the warriors were Martin, Alec Ingle-
blad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped
to flannel undershirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling
their cards, eyes squinting and vacant.

When Bert Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good
fame of Wheatsylvania, and to every one he gossiped about
Martin’s evil ways and his own patience. Thus it happened
that while Martin was at the height of his prosperity and credit
as a physician, along the Pony River Valley sinuated the whis¬
pers that he was a gambler, that he was a “drinking man,” that
he never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning,
“Too bad to see a decent young man like that going to the
dogs.”

Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented
the well-meant greetings: “You ought to leave a little hooch
for the rest of us to drink, Doc,” or “I s’pose you’re too busy
playing poker to drive out to the house and take a look at the
woman.” He was guilty of an absurd and boyish tactlessness
when he heard Norblom observing to the postmaster, “A fellow
that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with that
fool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn’t ought to go getting drunk and
disgracing — ”

Martin stopped. “Norblom! You talking about me?”

The storekeeper turned slowly. “I got more important things
to do ’n talk about you,” he cackled.

As Martin went on he heard laughter.

He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their
snooping was in part an affectionate interest, and in¬
evitable in a village where the most absorbing event of the

ARRO WSMITH

169

year was the United Brethren Sunday School picnic on Fourth
of July. But he could not rid himself of twitchy discomfort
at their unending and maddeningly detailed comments on
everything. He felt as though the lightest word he said in his
consultation-room would be megaphoned from flapping ear to
ear all down the country roads.

He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with
the barber, nor was he condescending to meteorologicomania,
but except for Leora he had no one with whom he could talk
of his work. Angus Duer had been cold, but Angus had his
teeth into every change of surgical technique, and he was an
acrid debater. Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not only
would he harden into timid morality under the pressure of the
village, but be fixed in a routine of prescriptions and bandag¬
ing.

He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.

He had seen Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard
of him as the most honest practitioner in the Valley. On im¬
pulse Martin drove down to call on him.

Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shoul¬
dered. You knew immediately that he was careful and that
he was afraid of nothing, however much he might lack in
imagination. He received Martin with no vast ebullience, and
his stare said, “Well, what do you want? I’m a busy man.”

“Doctor,” Martin chattered, “do you find it hard to keep up
with medical developments?”

“No. Read the medical journals.”

“Well, don’t you — gosh, I don’t want to get sentimental about
it, but don’t you find that without contact with the Big Guns
you get mentally lazy — sort of lacking in inspiration?”

“I do not! There’s enough inspiration for me in trying to
help the sick.”

To himself Martin was protesting, “All right, if you don’t
want to be friendly, go to the devil!” But he tried again:

“I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of
increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you
don’t have anything but routine practise among a lot of farm¬
ers?”

“Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there’s a lot
of you young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers,
that are doing their own jobs better than you are. You think
that if you were only in the city with libraries and medical

170

ARROWSMITH

meetings and everything, you’d develop. Well, I don’t know of
anything to prevent your studying at home ! You consider your¬
self so much better educated than these rustics, but I notice
you say ‘gosh’ and ‘Big Guns’ and that sort of thing. How
much do you read? Personally, I’m extremely well satisfied.
My people pay me an excellent living wage, they appreciate
my work, and they honor me by election to the schoolboard.
I find that a good many of these farmers think a lot harder
and squarer than the swells I meet in the city. Well! I don t
see any reason for feeling superior, or lonely either!

“Hell, I don’t!” Martin mumbled. As he drove back he
raged at Hesselink’s superiority about not feeling superior, but
he stumbled into uncomfortable meditation. It was true; he
was half-educated. He was supposed to be a college graduate
but he knew nothing of economics, nothing of history, nothing
of music or painting. Except in hasty bolting for examinations
he had read no poetry save that of Robert Service, and the
only prose besides medical journalism at which he looked
nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis
papers and Wild West stories in the magazines.

He reviewed the “intelligent conversation ’ which, in the desert
of Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at
Mohalis. He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been
pretentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and
as smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and that his own
discourse had differed from Clif’s largely in that it had been
less fantastic and less original. He could recall nothing save
the philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldings of Angus
Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox’s digressions, and the
councils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingle-
blad’s barber-shop.

He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving him¬
self; he fell upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, an¬
nounced that they were “going to get educated, if it kills us.”
He went at it as he had gone at bacteriology.

He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked inter¬
ested or at least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy
of “The Golden Bowl” which an unfortunate school-teacher
had left at the Tozers’; he borrowed a volume of Conrad from
the village editor and afterward, as he drove the prairie roads,
he was marching into jungle villages — sun helmets, orchids, lost
temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and sun-

ARROWSMITH

171

scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary.
It cannot be said that he became immediately and conspicu¬
ously articulate, yet it is possible that in those long intense
evenings of reading with Leora he advanced a step or two
toward the tragic enchantments of Max Gottlieb’s world — en¬
chanting sometimes and tragic always.

But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied
as Dr. Hesselink.

Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.

In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier
of science. He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he
was a rich man and eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories
nor had a decent office and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed
the world fighting epidemics and founding institutions and mak¬
ing inconvenient speeches and trying new drinks. He was a
Swede by birth, a German by education, a little of everything
by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington,
and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and
Fuchau, from Milan and Bechuanaland, from Antofagasta and
Cape Romanzoff. Manson on Tropical Diseases mentions
Sondelius’s admirable method of killing rats with hydrocyanic
acid gas, and The Sketch once mentioned his atrocious system in
baccarat.

Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most
diseases could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis,
cancer, typhoid, the plague, influenza, were an invading army
against which the world must mobilize — literally; that public
health authorities must supersede generals and oil kings. He
was lecturing through America, and his exclamatory assertions
were syndicated in the press.

Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science
or health but Sondelius’s violence caught him, and suddenly
he was converted, and it was an important thing for him, that
conversion.

He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick,
essentially he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of
Leopolis and Dr. Hesselink of Groningen; that though they
might be honest, honesty and healing were less their purpose
than making money; that to get rid of avoidable disease and

ARROWSMITH

172

produce a healthy population would be the worst thing in the
world for them; and that they must all be replaced by public
health officials.

Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.
Since the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously
sought a new passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sonde-
lius’s war on disease. Immediately he became as annoying to
his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.

He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to
have so much tuberculosis.

This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American
citizens was better established, or more often used, than the
privilege of being ill. They fumed, “Who does he think he is?
We call him in for doctoring, not for bossing. Why, the damn’
fool said we ought to burn down our houses — said we were
committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won’t stand for
nobody talking to me like that!”

Everything became clear to Martin — too clear. The nation
must make the best physicians autocratic officials, at once,
and that was all there was to it. As to how the officials were
to become perfect executives, and how people were to be per¬
suaded to obey them, he had no suggestions but only a beauti¬
ful faith. At breakfast he scolded, “Another idiotic day of
writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have
happened! If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with
men like Sondelius! It makes me tired!”

Leora murmured, “Yes, darling. I’ll promise to be good.
I won’t have any little bellyaches or T. B. or anything, so
please don’t lecture me!”

Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with
child.

Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised
to it everything he had missed.

“He’s going to have a real education!” he gloated, as they
sat on the porch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all this litera¬
ture and stuff. We haven’t done much ourselves — here we are,
stuck in this two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives —
but maybe we’ve gone a little beyond our dads, and he’ll go
way beyond us.”

ARROWSMITH

173

He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue
morning sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-
green and tousled and hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid,
and came home to help, to wipe the dishes and sweep the
front walk. All evening he read to her, not history now and
Henry James but “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” which
both of them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by
the grubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weak¬
ness; he held her hand and crowed:

“Golly, we — No, not ‘golly.’ Well, what can you say ex¬
cept ‘golly’? Anyway: Some day we’ll save up enough money
for a couple months in Italy and all those places. All those old
narrow streets and old castles! There must be scads of ’em
that are couple hundred years old or older! And we’ll take the
boy . . . Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn him! . . .
And he’ll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like
a regular native, and his dad and mother’ll be so proud! Oh,
we’ll be a fierce pair of old birds! We never did have any
more morals ’n a rabbit, either of us, and probably when we’re
seventy we’ll sit out on the doorstep and smoke pipes and
snicker at all the respectable people going by, and tell each other
scandalous stories about ’em till they want to take a shot at us,
and our boy — he’ll wear a plug hat and have a chauffeur — he
won’t dare to recognize us!”

Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he
shouted, when she was racked and ghastly with the indignity
of morning sickness, “There, that’s fine, old girl! Wouldn’t be
making a good baby if you weren’t sick. Everybody is.”
He was lying, and he was nervous. Whenever he thought of
her dying, he seemed to die with her. Barren of her compan¬
ionship, there would be nothing he wanted to do, nowhere to
go. What would be the worth of having all the world if he
could not show it to her, if she was not there —

He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings,
by every gay device of moonlight and white limbs and reach¬
ing loneliness, into having babies, then making birth as cruel
and clumsy and wasteful as she could. He was abrupt and
jerky with patients who called him into the country. With
their suffering he was sympathetic as he had never been, for his
eyes had opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must
not go far from Leora’s need.

Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting. Sud-

ARROWS MITH

174

denly, while she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for
Dr. Hesselink, and that horrible afternoon when the prairie
spring was exuberant outside the windows of the poor iodoform-
reeking room, they took the baby from her, dead.

Had it been possible, he might have understood Hesselink’s
success then, have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and
sureness, which made people entrust their lives to him. Not
cold and blaming was Hesselink now, but an older and wiser
brother, very compassionate. Martin saw nothing. He was
not a physician. He was a terrified boy, less useful to Hesse¬
link than the dullest nurse.

When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat
by her bed, coaxing, “We’ll just have to make up our minds
we never can have a baby now, and so I want — Oh, I’m no
good! And I’ve got a rotten temper. But to you, I want to be
everything! ”

She whispered, scarce to be heard:

“He would have been such a sweet baby. Oh, I know! I
saw him so often. Because I knew he was going to be like
you, when you were a baby.” She tried to laugh. “Perhaps I
wanted him because I could boss him. I’ve never had any¬
body that would let me boss him. So if I can’t have a real
baby, I’ll have to bring you up. Make you a great man that
everybody will wonder at, like your Sondelius. . . . Darling,
I worried so about your worrying — ”

He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking,
eternally understanding, in the prairie twilight.

CHAPTER XVII

Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large hearti¬
ness, and a Maxwell which, though it was three years old this
May and deplorable as to varnish, he believed to be the supe¬
rior in speed and beauty of any motor in Dakota.

He came home in high cheerfulness, rode the youngest of
his three children pickaback, and remarked to his wife:

“Tessie, I got a swell idea.”

“Yes, and you got a swell breath, too. I wish you’d quit
testing that old Spirits Frumentus bottle at the drug store!”

“ ’At a girl! But honest, listen!”

“I will not!” She bussed him heartily. “Nothing doing
about driving to Los Angeles this summer. Too far, with all
the brats squalling.”

“Sure. All right. But I mean: Let’s pack up and light out
and spend a week touring ’round the state. Say to-morrow or
next. day. Got nothing to keep me now except that obstetrical
case, and we’ll hand that over to Winter.”

“All right. We can try out the new thermos bottles!”

Dr. Coughlin, his lady, and the children started at four in
morning. The car was at first too well arranged to be inter¬
esting, but after three days, as he approached you on the flat
road that without an inch of curving was slashed for leagues
through the grassy young wheat, you saw the doctor in his
khaki suit, his horn-rimmed spectacles, and white linen boating
hat ; his wife in a green flannel blouse and a lace boudoir cap.
The rest of the car was slightly confused. While you motored
by you noticed a canvas Egyptian Water Bottle, mud on wheels
and fenders, a spade, two older children leaning perilously out
and making tongues at you, the baby’s diapers hanging on a line
across the tonneau, a torn copy of Snappy Stories, seven lolly-
pop sticks, a jack, a fish-rod, and a rolled tent.

Your last impression was of two large pennants labeled
“Leopolis, N. D.,” and “Excuse Our Dust.”

The Coughlins had agreeable adventures. Once they were

i75

ARROWS MITH

176

stuck in a mud-hole. To the shrieking admiration of the
family, the doctor got them out by making a bridge of fence
rails. Once the ignition ceased and, while they awaited a gar-
ageman summoned by telephone, they viewed a dairy farm with
an electrical milking machine. All the way they were broad¬
ened by travel, and discovered the wonders of the great world:
the movie theater at Roundup, which had for orchestra not
only a hand-played piano but also a violin ; the black fox farm
at Melody; and the Severance water-tower, which was said to
be the tallest in Central North Dakota.

Dr. Coughlin “dropped in to pass the time of day,” as he
said, with all the doctors. At St. Luke he had an intimate
friend in Dr. Tromp — at least they had met twice, at the
annual meetings of the Pony River Valley Medical Association.
When he told Tromp how bad they had found the hotels,
Tromp looked uneasy and conscientious, and sighed, “If the
wife could fix it up somehow, I’d like to invite you all to stay
with us to-night.”

“Oh, don’t want to impose on you. Sure it wouldn’t be any
trouble?” said Coughlin.

After Mrs. Tromp had recovered from her desire to call her
husband aside and make unheard but vigorous observations, and
after the oldest Tromp boy had learned that “it wasn’t nice
for a little gentleman to kick his wee guests that came from so
far, far away,” they were all very happy. Mrs. Coughlin and
Mrs. Tromp bewailed the cost of laundry soap and butter, and
exchanged recipes for pickled peaches, while the men, sitting on
the edge of the porch, their knees crossed, eloquently waving
their cigars, gave themselves up to the ecstasy of shop-talk:

“Say, Doctor, how do you find collections?”

(It was Coughlin speaking — or it might have been Tromp.)

“Well, they’re pretty good. These Germans pay up first
rate. Never send ’em a bill, but when they’ve harvested they
come in and say, ‘How much do I owe you, Doctor?’ ”

“Yuh, the Germans are pretty good pay.”

“Yump, they certainly are. Not many dead-beats among the
Germans.”

“Yes, that’s a fact. Say, tell me, Doctor, what do you do
with your jaundice cases?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Doctor: if it’s a persistent case I usually
give ammonium chlorid.”

“Do you? I’ve been giving ammonium chlorid but here the

ARROWSMITH 177

other day I see a communication in the Journal of the AM. A.
where a fellow was claiming it wasn’t any good.”

‘‘Is that a fact! Well, well! I didn’t see that. Hum.
Well. Say, Doctor, do you find you can do much with asthma?”

“Well now, Doctor, just in confidence, I’m going to tell you
something that may strike you as funny, but I believe that
foxes’ lungs are fine for asthma, and T.B. too. I told that to
a Sioux City pulmonary specialist one time and he laughed at
me — said it wasn’t scientific — and I said to him, ‘Hell ! ’ I said,
‘scientific! ’ I said, ‘I don’t know if it’s the latest fad and wrinkle
in science or not,’ I said, ‘but I get results, and that’s what I’m
looking for ’s results!’ I said. I tell you a plug G.P. may not
have a lot of letters after his name, but he sees a slew of
mysterious things that he can’t explain, and I swear I believe
most of these damn’ alleged scientists could learn a whale of a
lot from the plain country practitioners, let me tell you!’

“Yuh, that’s a fact. Personally I’d rather stay right here in
the country and be able to do a little hunting and take it easy
than be the classiest specialist in the cities. One time I kind
of figured on becoming an X-ray specialist — place in New York
where you can take the whole course in eight weeks — and
maybe settling in Butte or Sioux Falls, but I figured that even
if I got to making eight-ten thousand a year, ’twouldn’t hardly
mean more than three thousand does here and so — And a fel¬
low has to consider his duty to his old patients.”

“That’s so. . . . Say, Doctor, say what sort of fellow is
McMinturn, down your way?”

“Well, I don’t like to knock any fellow practitioner, and I
suppose he’s well intentioned, but just between you and me
he does too confounded much guesswork. Now you take you
and me, we apply science to a case, instead of taking a chance
and just relying on experience and going off half-cocked. But
McMinturn, he doesn’t know enough. And say, that wife of
his, she’s., a caution — she’s got the meanest tongue in four coun¬
ties, and the way she chases around drumming up business for
Mac — Well, I suppose that’s their way of doing business.”

“Is old Winter keeping going?”

“Oh, yes, in a sort of way. You know how he is. Of course
he’s about twenty years behind the times, but he’s a great
hand-holder — keep some fool woman in bed six weeks longer
than he needs to, and call around twice a day and chin with
her — absolutely unnecessary.”

178

ARROWSMITH

“I suppose you get your biggest competition from Silzer,
Doctor?”

“Don’t you believe it, Doctor! He isn’t beginning to do the
practise he lets on to. Trouble with Silzer is, he’s too brash —
shoots off his mouth too much — likes to hear himself talk.
Oh, say, by the way, have you run into this new fellow— will
been located here about two years now — at Wheatsylvania—
Arrowsmith?”

“No, but they say he’s a good bright young fellow.”

“Yes, they claim he’s a brainy man — very well-informed — ■
and I hear his wife is a nice brainy little woman.”

“I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much though — likes his
booze awful’ well.”

“Yes, so they say. Shame, for a nice hustling young fellow.
I like a nip myself, now and then, but a Drinking Man — !
Suppose he’s drunk and gets called out on a case! And a fel¬
low from down there was telling me Arrowsmith is great on
books and study, but he’s a freethinker — never goes to church.”

“Is that a fact! Hm. Great mistake for any doctor to not
identify himself with some good solid religious denomination,
whether he believes the stuff or not. I tell you a priest or a
preacher can send you an awful lot of business.”

“You bet he can! Well, this fellow said Arrowsmith was
always arguing with the preachers — he told some Reverend that
everybody ought to read this immunologist Max Gottlieb, and
this Jacques Loeb — you know — the fellow that, well I don’t
recall just exactly what it was, but he claimed he could create
living fishes out of chemicals.”

“Sure! There you got it! That’s the kind of delusions these
laboratory fellows get unless they have some practical practise
to keep ’em well balanced. Well, if Arrowsmith falls for that
kind of fellow, no wonder people don’t trust him.”

“That’s so. Hm. Well, it’s too bad Arrowsmith goes drink¬
ing and helling around and neglecting his family and his
patients. I can see his finish. Shame. Well — wonder what
time o’ night it’s getting to be?”

Bert Tozer wailed, “Mart, what you been doing to Dr.
Coughlin of Leopolis? Fellow told me he was going around say¬
ing you were a boose-hoister and so on.”

ARROW SMITH

179

“Did he? People do sort of keep an eye on one another
around here, don’t they.”

“You bet your life they do, and that’s why I tell you you
ought to cut out the poker and the booze. You don’t see me
needing any liquor, do you?”

Martin more desperately than ever felt the whole county
watching him. He was not a praise-eater; he was not proud
that he should feel misplaced; but however sturdily he strug¬
gled he saw himself outside the picture of Wheatsylvania and
trudging years of country practise.

Suddenly, without planning it, forgetting in his admiration
for Sondelius and the health war his pride of the laboratory,
he was thrown into a research problem.

There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County.
The state veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker
vaccine had been injected, but the disease spread. Martin
heard the farmers wailing. He noted that the injected cattle
showed no inflammation nor rise in temperature. He was
roused by a suspicion that the Hunziker vaccine had insufficient
living organisms, and he went yelping on the trail of his hy¬
pothesis.

He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine
and tested it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory. He had to work
out his own device for growing anaerobic cultures, but he had
been trained by the Gottlieb who remarked, “Any man dat iss
unable to build a filter out of toot’-picks, if he has to, would
maybe better buy his results along with his fine equipment.”
Out of a large fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin made his
apparatus.

When he was altogether sure that the vaccine did not con¬
tain living blackleg organisms, he was much more delighted
than if he had found that good Mr. Dawson Hunziker was
producing honest vaccine.

With no excuse and less encouragement he isolated blackleg
organisms from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vac¬
cine of his own. It took much time. He did not neglect his
patients but certainly he failed to appear in the stores, at the
poker games. Leora and he dined on a sandwich every evening
and hastened to the laboratory, to heat the cultures in the im-

i8o

ARROWS MITH

provised water-bath, an ancient and leaky oatmeal-cooker with
an alcohol lamp. The Martin who had been impatient of
Hesselink was of endless patience as he watched his results.
He whistled and hummed, and the hours from seven to mid¬
night were a moment. Leora, frowning placidly, the tip of her
tongue at the corner of her mouth, guarded the temperature like
a good little watchdog.

After three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a vaccine
which satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd. The black¬
leg stopped, which was for Martin the end and the reward, and
he turned his notes and supply of vaccine over to the state
veterinarian. For others, it was not the end. The veterinarians
of the county denounced him for intruding on their right to
save or kill cattle; the physicians hinted, “That’s the kind of
monkey-business that ruins the dignity of the profession. I tell
you Arrowsmith’s a medical nihilist and a notoriety-seeker,
that’s what he is. You mark my words, instead of his sticking
to decent regular practise, you’ll be hearing of his opening a
quack sanitarium, one of these days!”

He commented to Leora:

“Dignity, hell! If I had my way I’d be doing research — oh,
not this cold detached stuff of Gottlieb but really practical
work — and then I’d have some fellow like Sondelius take my
results and jam ’em down people’s throats, and I’d make them
and their cattle and their tabby-cats healthy whether they
wanted to be or not, that’s what I’d do!”

In this mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a
half column on the marriage of the light middleweight cham¬
pion and three lines devoted to the lynching of an I.W.W. agi¬
tator, the announcement:

Gustave Sundelios, well-known authority on cholera prevention
will give an address on “Heroes of Health” at the University sum¬
mer school next Friday evening.

He ran into the house gloating, “Lee! Sondelius going to lec¬
ture in Minneapolis. I’m going! Come on! We’ll hear him
and have a bat and everything!”

No, you run down by yourself. Be fine for you to get
away from the town and the family and me for a while. I’ll
go down with you in the fall. Honestly. If I’m not in the
way, maybe you can manage to have a good long talk with
Dr. Sondelius.”

ARROWSMITH

181

“Fat chance! The big city physicians and the state health
authorities will be standing around him ten deep. But I’m
going.”

The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the
day-coach was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by
the hours of slow riding. He drowsed and smoked and medi¬
tated. “I’m going to forget medicine and everything else,” he
vowed. “I’ll go up and talk to somebody in the smoker and
tell him I’m a shoe-salesman.”

He did. Unfortunately his confidant happened to be a real
shoe-salesman, with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin
represented, and he returned to the day coach with a renewed
sense of injury. When he reached Minneapolis, in mid-after¬
noon, he hastened to the University and besought a ticket to the
Sondelius lecture before he had even found a hotel, though
not before he had found the long glass of beer which he had
been picturing for a hundred miles.

He had an informal but agreeable notion of spending his
first evening of freedom in dissipation. Somewhere he would
meet a company of worthies who would succor him with laugh¬
ter and talk and many drinks — not too many drinks, of course
— and motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a moon¬
light swim. He began his search for the brethren by having a
cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue res¬
taurant. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to desire a
companion. He was lonely for Leora, and all his state of grace,
all his earnest and simple-hearted devotion to carousal, degen¬
erated into sleepiness.

As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, “And
probably the Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he’s
simply another Roscoe Geake.”

In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door
of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and
ambled away. Martin was half minded to desert with them,
and he went in sulkily. The hall was a third full of summer
students and teachers, and men who might have been doctors

1 82

ARROWS MITH

or school-principals. He sat at the back, fanning with his
straw hat, disliking the man with side-whiskers who shared the
row with him, disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to him¬
self having no good opinions whatever.

Then the room was charged with vitality. Down the central
aisle, ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered
a man with a smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly
flaxen hair — a Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat
straight. He was strengthened to endure even the depressing
man with side-whiskers as Sondelius launched out, in a musical
bellow with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish singsong:

“The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy
the medical profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure
of but one thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health
is not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler
shows in ‘Erewhon’ — the swine stole that idea from me, too,
maybe thirty years before I ever got it — the only crime for
w’ich we should hang people is having toobercoolosis.”

“Umph!” grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it
was fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.

Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incanta¬
tions. With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever,
Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in
a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath
the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill
town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when
babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the
gilt and blunted sword of the law.

“That’s what I want to do! Not just tinker at a lot of
worn-out bodies but make a new world!” Martin hungered.

Gosh, I d follow him through fire! And the way he lays out
the crapehangers that criticize public health results! If I
could only manage to meet him and talk to him for a couple o’
minutes — ”

He lingered after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded
Sondelius on the platform; a few shooks hands; a few asked
questions; a doctor worried, “But how about the danger of free
clinics and all those things drifting into socialism?” Martin
stood back till Sondelius had been deserted. A janitor was
closing the windows, very firmly and suggestively. Sondelius
looked about, and Martin would have sworn that the Great
Man was lonely. He shook hands with him, and quaked:

ARROWSMITH 183

“Sir, if you aren’t due some place, I wonder if you’d like to
come out and have a — a — ”

Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled,
“Have a drink? Well I think maybe I would. How did the
joke about the dog and his fleas go to-night? Do you think
they liked it?”

“Oh, sure, you bet.”

The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand
Tatars, of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and
refusing a decoration from quite a good Balkan king, looked
affectionately on his band of one disciple and demanded, “Was
it all right — was it? Did they like it? So hot to-night, and I
been lecturing nine time a week — Des Moines, Fort Dodge,
LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet (but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay) and
— I forget. Was it all right? Did they like it?”

“Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I’ve
never enjoyed anything so much in my life!”

The prophet crowed, “Come! I buy a drink. As a hygien¬
ist, I war on alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as
bad as coffee or even ice cream soda. But as one who is fond
of talking, I find a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent
of human idiocy. Is there a cool place with some Pilsener
here in Detroit — no; where am I to-night? — Minneapolis?”

“I understand there’s a good beer-garden. And we can get
the trolley right near here.”

Sondelius stared at him. “Oh, I have a taxi waiting.”

Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxi-cab he tried
to think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.

“Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Eu¬
rope?”

Sondelius ignored him. “Did you see that girl going by?
What ankles! What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-
garden? Have they any decent cognac? Do you know Cour-
voisier 1865 cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I will give
it up. And wearing dress clothes a night like this! You know,
I mean all the crazy things I say in my lectures, but let us now
forget being earnest, let us drink, let us sing £Der Graf von
Luxemburg,’ let us detach exquisite girls from their escorts,
let us discuss the joys of ‘Die Meistersinger,’ which only I
appreciate ! ”

In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of
the Cosmos Club, Halle’s investigation of infant morality, the

ARROWSMITH

184

suitability of combining benedictine and apple-jack, Biarritz,
Lord Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination,
George Gissing, and homard tkermidor. Martin looked for
a connection between Sondelius and himself, as one does with
the notorious or with people met abroad. He might have said,
“I think I met a man who knows you,” or “I have had the
pleasure of reading all your articles,” but he fished with “Did
you ever run into the two big men in my medical school —
Winnemac — Dean Silva and Max Gottlieb?”

“Silva? I don’t remember. But Gottlieb — you know him?
Oh!” Sondelius waved his mighty arms. “The greatest! The
spirit of science! I had the pleasure to talk with him at
McGurk. He would not sit here bawling like me! He makes
me like a circus clown! He takes all my statements about
epidemiology and shows me I am a fool! Ho, ho, ho!” He
beamed, and was off on a denunciation of high tariff.

Each topic had its suitable refreshment. Sondelius was a
fantastic drinker, and zinc-lined. He mixed Pilsener, whisky,
black coffee, and a liquid which the waiter asserted to be
absinthe. “I should go to bed at midnight,” he lamented,
“but it is a cardinal sin to interrupt good talk. Yoost tempt
me a little! I am an easy one to be tempted! But I must
have five hours’ sleep. Absolute! I lecture in — it’s some
place in Iowa — to-morrow evening. Now that I am past
fifty, I cannot get along with three hours as I used to, and
yet I have found so many new things that I want to talk
about.”

He was more eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed. A
surly-looking man at the next table listened and peered, and
laughed at them. Sondelius dropped from Haffkine’s cholera
serum to an irate:

“If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and
kill him! I am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young,
but I do not like starers. I will go and argue with him. I
will yoost hit him a little!”

While the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man,
threatened him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands
repeatedly, and brought him back to Martin.

“This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg. He
is a carpenter. Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink.
Herumph ! VAI-ter ! ”

The carpenter was a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Ad-

ARROWS MITH

185

entibt, a ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit. He
denounced Sondelius as an aristocrat, he denounced Martin for
is ignorance of economics, he denounced the waiter concern-
mgthebrandy; Sondehus and Martin and the waiter answered
with vigor; and the conversation became admirable. Pres-
ent y they were turned out of the beer-garden and the three

thehTebaUnaedWh° Waiting taxicab> which shook to

their debating Where they went, Martin could never trace.

He may have dreamed the whole tale. Once they were appar¬
el7 in a roadhouse on a long street which must have^een
University Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington Avenue
South, where three tramps were sleeping at the end of the bar-

coffL'U themPenter,S h0US6’ Wh6re an unexPlained man made

Wherever they might be, they were at the same time in
Moscow and Curasao and Murwillumbah. The carpenter
created communistic states, while Sondelius, proclaiming that
he did not care whether he worked under socialism or an em-

Pe™r f°, Iong. as. he could buI1y people into being well, annihi¬
lated tuberculosis and by dawn had cancer fleeing.

They parted at four, tearfully swearing to meet again, in
Minnesota or Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and
Martin started for Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this
nonsense of allowing people to be ill.

And the great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva
had slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain “Encore” Edwards the
playful chemist, Edwards had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vick¬
is0*1 had slain the minister’s son who had a real’ trapeze in
his barn. ^

CHAPTER XVIII

Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide’s Grove acted in spare time as
Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office
was not well paid and it did not greatly interest him. When
Martin burst in and offered to do all the work for half the
pay, Woestijne accepted with benevolence, assuring him that it
would have a great effect on his private practise.

It did. It almost ruined his private practise.

There was never an official appointment. Martin signed
Woestijne’s name (spelling it in various interesting ways, de¬
pending on how he felt) to papers, and the Board of County
Commissioners recognized Martin’s limited power, but the
whole thing was probably illegal.

There was small science and considerably less heroism in his
first furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for
his fellow-townsmen. He poked into yards, he denounced
Mrs. Beeson for her reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for
piling manure on the street, and the schoolboard for the school
ventilation and lack of instruction in tooth-brushing. The
citizens had formerly been agitated by his irreligion, his moral
looseness, and his lack of local patriotism, but when they were
prodded out of their comfortable and probably beneficial dirt,
they exploded.

Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had
the innocence of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the ser¬
pent. He did not make them understand his mission; he
scarce tried to make them understand. His authority, as
Woestijne’s alter ego, was imposing on paper but feeble in
action, and it was worthless against the stubbornness which
he aroused.

He advanced from garbage-spying to a drama of infection.

The community at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which
Slackened and continually reappeared. The villagers believed
that it came from a tribe of squatters six miles up the creek.

1 86

ARROWSMITH

187

and they considered lynching the offenders, as a practical pro¬
test and an interesting break in wheat-farming. When Martin
insisted that in six miles the creek would purify any waste and
that the squatters were probably not the cause, he was amply
denounced.

“He’s a fine one, he is, to go around blatting that we’d
ought to have more health precautions! Here we go and show
him where there’s some hellhounds that ought to be shot, and
them only Bohunks anyway, and he doesn’t do a darn’ thing
but shoot a lot of hot air about germicidal effect or whatever
the fool thing is,” remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at the
Delft elevator.

Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly
not enlarging his own practise, Martin mapped every recent
case of typhoid within five miles of Delft. Fie looked into
milk-routes and grocery deliveries. He discovered that most
of the cases had appeared after the visits of an itinerant
seamstress, a spinster virtuous and almost painfully hygienic.
She had had typhoid four years before.

“She’s a chronic carrier of the bugs. She’s got to be exam¬
ined,” he announced.

He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.

With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as
he went away she could be heard weeping at the insult, while
the preacher cursed him from the doorstep. He returned with
the township police officer and had the seamstress arrested and
confined in the segregation ward of the county poor-farm. In
her discharges he found billions of typhoid bacilli.

The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-
lined whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened.
She had always been well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright¬
eyed spinster who brought presents to the babies, helped the
overworked farmwives to cook dinner, and sang to the children
in her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled for persecuting
her. “He wouldn’t dare pick on her if she wasn’t so poor,”
they said, and they talked of a jail -delivery.

Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-
farm, he tried to make her understand that there was no other
place for her, he brought her magazines and sweets. But he
was firm. She could not go free. He was convinced that she
had caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid, with nine
deaths.

i88

ARROWSMITH

The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had
been well for four years? The County Commissioners and
the County Board of Health called Dr. Hesselink in from the
next county. He agreed with Martin and his maps. Every
meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it was
uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.

Leora saved him, and the seamstress. “Why not take up a
collection to send her off to some big hospital where she can
be treated, or where they can keep her if she can’t be cured?”
said she.

The seamstress entered a sanitarium — and was amiably for¬
gotten by everybody for the rest of her life — and his recent
enemies said of Martin, “He’s mighty smart, and right on the
job.” Hesselink drove over to inform him, “You did pretty
well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see you’re settling down
to business.”

Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after
a fine new epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case
of small-pox and several which he suspected. Some of these
lay across the border in Mencken County, Hesselink’s domain,
and Hesselink laughed at him. “It’s probably all chicken-
pox, except your one case. Mighty rarely you get small-pox
in summer,” he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down
the two counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring every one
to be vaccinated, thundering, “There’s going to be all hell let
loose here in ten or fifteen days!”

But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in
Wheatsylvania and two other villages, was an anti-vaccination¬
ist and he preached against it. The villages sided with him.
Martin went from house to house, beseeching them, offering to
treat them without charge. As he had never taught them to love
him and follow him as a leader, they questioned, they argued
long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was drunk.
Though for weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid coffee
of the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was
drunk every night, that the United Brethren minister was about
to expose him from the pulpit.

And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the
first case did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and
the village roared and Martin was the butt of the land.

He had only a little resented their gossip about his wicked¬
ness, only in evenings of slow depression had he meditated

ARROWSMITH

189

upon fleeing from them, but at their laughter he was black

furious. , „ ,

Leora comforted him with cool hands. It 11 pass over, she

said. But it did not pass.

By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants
love through all the world. He had, they mirthfully related,
declared that anybody who kept hogs would die of small-pox;
he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from
gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They greeted him, with
no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a pimple on
mv chin, Doc. What is ’t small-pox?

More terrible than their rage is the people s laughter, and 11
it rend tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise

man and befouls their treasure. . . . , .

When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic
of diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half
of them remembered his failure to save Mary Novak and the
other half clamored, “Oh, give us a rest! You got epidemics
on the brain!” That a number of children quite adequately
died did not make them relinquish their comic epic.

Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said
quietly “I’m licked. I’ve got to get out. Nothing more I
can do here. Take years before they’d trust me again
They’re so damned humorous! I’m going to go get a rea

^^T^so^laT^You’re too good for them here. We’ll find
some big place where they’ll appreciate your work..

“No, that’s not fair. I’ve learned a little something I ve
failed here. I’ve antagonized too many people. I didn t kno
how to handle them. We could stick it out, and I would,
except that life is short and I think I’m a good worker m some
way? Been worrying about being a coward, about running
Iwav Turning my-’ What is it? ‘-turning my hand from
the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can
do! P Gottlieb saw it! And I want to get to work. On we go.

All right?”

“Of course!”

He had read in the Journal of the American Medical Asso¬
ciation that Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at

ARRO WSMITH

190

Harvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health
appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty
scrawl, that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis vaca¬
tion, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the
nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian
restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his
health-official friends as to a position.

Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Di¬
rector of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was look¬
ing for a second-in-command, and would probably be willing
to send particulars.

Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.

“Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against
three hundred and sixty-six here — no, wait, it’s three hundred
and sixty-seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska’s that
the dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that
can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we’ll be like
a pair of kids let loose from school!”

He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the
station agent, who was also telegraph operator.

The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that
Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only
full-time medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the
clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-
time. The assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist,
and manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay in¬
spectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary would be
twenty-five hundred dollars a year — against the fifteen or six¬
teen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.

Proper recommendations were desired.

. Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gott¬
lieb, now at the McGurk Institute in New York.

Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, “I have received very
pleasant letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you,
but the letter from Dr. Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He
says you have rare gifts as a laboratory man. I take great
pleasure in offering you the appointment kindly wire.”

Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leav¬
ing Wheatsylvania — the tedium of Bert Tozer’s nagging — the
spying of Pete Yeska and the Norbloms — the inevitability of
turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south
from tne Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and following

ARROWSMITH

191

again that weary, flat, unbending trail — the superiority of Dr.
Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin— the round which
left him no time for his dusty laboratory — leaving it all for
the achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.
“Leora, we’re going! We’re really going!”

Bert Tozer said:

“You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a
traitor, after all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back
the thousand, to let some other doc come in here and get all
that influence away from the Family.”

Ada Quist said:

“I guess if you ain’t any too popular with the folks around
here you’ll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus!
Well Bert and me are going to get married next year and when
you two swells make a failure of it I suppose we’ll have to
take care of you at our house when you come sneaking back
do you think we could get your house at the same rent you
paid for it oh Bert why couldn’t we take Mart’s office instead
it would save money well I’ve always said since we were in
school together you couldn’t stand a decent regular life Ory.

Mr. Tozer said:

“I simply can’t understand it, with everything going so nice.
Why, you’d be making three-four thousand a year some day,
if you just stuck to it. Haven’t we tried to treat you nice?
I don’t like to have my little girl go away and leave me alone
now I’m getting on in years. And Bert gets so cranky with
me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind ^of listen
to us. Can’t you fix it somehow so you could stay?’

Pete Yeska said:

“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when
I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped
about this drug business, but Lord!. I been kind of half
thinking about coming around some time and offering you a
partnership and let you run the drug end to suit yourself, and
we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice
little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us. . . .
Well come back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks,
and have a good laugh about that bull you made over the
small-pox. I never will forget that! I was saying to the old

192

ARROWSMITH

woman just the other day, when she had an ear-ache, Ain’t
got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!’”

Dr. Hesselink said:

“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why,
you and I were just beginning to bring medical practise in this
neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over
to-night — Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we
did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you. Small
place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors
to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop
from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now
you’re going away — you don’t know how I feel!”

Henry Novak said:

“Why, Doc, you ain’t going to leave us? And we got a
new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other
day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the
truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.’ ”

The wheat-buyer at Delft said:

“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t going away? A fellow
told me you was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of a damn’
fool than the Lord meant you to be,’ I says. But I got to
worrying about it, and I drove over and — Doc, I fire off my
mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the typhoid
epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the sick¬
ness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you’d
like to be state senator, and if you’ll stay — I got quite a little
influence — believe me, I’ll get out and work my shirt off for
you ! ”

Alec Ingleblad said:

“You’re a lucky guy!”

All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.

For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his
neighbors. “I feel like getting off and going back. Didn’t we
used to have fun playing Five Hundred with the Fraziers!
I hate to think of the kind of doctor they may get. I swear,
if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects the health
work again, I’ll go back and run ’em both out of business!
And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways.”

But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing
world existed save the yellow Pinsch gas globes above them
in the long car, they saw ahead of them great Nautilus, high
honor and achievement, the making of a radiant model city,
and the praise of Sondelius — perhaps even of Max Gottlieb.

CHAPTER XIX

Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a
shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and
rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn
springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who
sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with
the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no
less brisk. There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen
in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and
frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only au¬
thentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both
cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not
look alike for so many miles.

The difficulty in defining its quality is that no one has de¬
termined whether it is a very large village or a very small
city. There are houses with chauffeurs and Baccardi cocktails,
but on August evenings all save a few score burghers sit in
their shirt-sleeves on front porches. Across from the ten-story
office building, in which a little magazine of the New Prose
S published by a young woman who for five months lived in
the cafes of Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion com¬
fortable with maples, and a line of Fords and lumber-wagons
in which the overalled farmers have come to town.

Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the
largest percentages of native-born whites and motor-car
owners, and the most moral and forward-looking cities of all
the States, and Nautilus is the most Iowan city in Iowa. One
out of every three persons above the age of sixty has spent a
winter in California, and among them are the champion horse¬
shoe pitcher of Pasadena and the woman who presented the
turkey which Miss Mary Pickford, the cinema princess, en¬
joyed at her Christmas dinner in 1912.

194

ARROWSMITH

Nautilus is distinguished by large houses with large lawns
and by an astounding quantity of garages and lofty church
spires. The fat fields run up to the edge of the city, and the
scattered factories, the innumerable railroad side-tracks, and
the scraggly cottages for workmen are almost amid the corn.
Nautilus manufactures steel windmills, agricultural imple¬
ments, including the celebrated Daisy Manure Spreader, and
such corn-products as Maize Mealies, the renowned breakfast-
food. It makes brick, it sells groceries wholesale, and it is the
headquarters of the Cornbelt Cooperative Insurance Company.

One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Chris¬
tian College, which has two hundred and seventeen students,
and sixteen instructors, of whom eleven are ministers of the
Church of Christ. The well-known Dr. Tom Bissex is foot¬
ball coach, health director, and professor of hygiene, chemistry,
physics, French, and German. Its shorthand and piano de¬
partments are known far beyond the limits of Nautilus, and
once, though that was some years ago, Mugford held the
Grinnell College baseball team down to a score of eleven to
five. It has never been disgraced by squabbles over teaching
evolutionary biology — it never has thought of teaching biology
at all.

Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned,
second-best hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh,
Director of the Department of Public Health.

The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the
back of that large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he
entered the drab reception-office he was highly received by the
stenographer and the two visiting nurses. Into the midst of
their flutterings — “Did you have a good trip, Doctor? Dr.
Pickerbaugh didn’t hardly expect you till to-morrow, Doctor.
Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?” — charged Picker¬
baugh, thundering welcomes.

Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate
of Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School. He
looked somewhat like President Roosevelt, with the same
squareness and the same bristly mustache, and he cultivated
the resemblance. He was a man who never merely talked;
he either bubbled or made orations.

ARROWS MITH

i95

He received Martin with four “Well’s,” which he gave after
the manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the
Department, led him into the Director’s private office, gave
him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly silence:

“Doctor, I’m delighted to have a man with your scientific
inclinations. Not that I should consider myself entirely with¬
out them. In fact I make it a regular practise to set aside a
period for scientific research, without a certain amount of
which even the most ardent crusade for health methods would
scarcely make much headway.”

It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin
settled in his chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he
found that it helped him to look more interested.

“But with me, I admit, it’s a matter of temperament. I
have often hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere
personal aggrandizement, the powers above may yet grant me
the genius to become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow
of the great and universally growing movement for public
health measures is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it
would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than
the Longfellow, because despite the beautiful passages and
high moral atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry
lacked the swing and punch of Kipling.

“I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have
had an opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city,
and the success we have in selling the idea of Better Health,
that what the world needs is a really inspired, courageous,
overtowering leader — say a Billy Sunday of the movement
a man who would know how to use sensationalism properly
and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the 'papers,
and I can only say they flatter me when they compare me
with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Chris¬
tian preachers — sometimes they claim that I’m too sensational.
Huh! If they only could understand it, trouble is I can’t be
sensational enough! Still, I try, I try, and — Look here.
Here’s a placard, it was painted by my daughter Orchid and
the poetry is my own humble effort, and let me tell you it
gets quoted around everywhere:

You can’t get health
By a pussyfoot stealth,

So let’s every health-booster
Crow just like a rooster.

!96 ARROWSMITH

“Then there’s another— this is a minor thing; it doesn’t
try to drive home general abstract principles, but it’d surprise
you the effect it’s had on careless housewives, who of course
don’t mean to neglect the health of their little ones and merely
need instruction and a little pep put into them, and when they
see a card like this, it makes ’em think:

Boil the milk bottles or by gum

You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.

“I’ve gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for
some of these things that didn’t hardly take me five minutes
to dash off. Some day when you get time, glance over this
volume of clippings — just to show you, Doctor, what you can
do if you go at the Movement in the up-to-date and scientific
manner. This one, about the temperance meeting I addressed
in Des Moines — say, I had that hall, and it was jam-pack-full,
lifting right up on their feet when I proved by statistics that
ninety-three per cent, of all insanity is caused by booze! Then
this — well, it hasn’t anything to do with health, directly, but
it’ll just indicate the opportunity you’ll have here to get in
touch with all the movements for civic weal.”

He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-
and-ink caricature portraying him with large mustached head
on a tiny body, was the headline:

DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTER

OF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIG

GO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE

Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, “That was a dandy
meeting! We increased church attendance here seventeen per
cent.! Oh, Doctor, you went to Winnemac and had your
internship in Zenith, didn’t you? Well, this might interest
you then. It’s from the Zenith Advocate-Times, and it’s by
Chum Frink, who, I think you’ll agree with me, ranks with
Eddie Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly
are the most popular, of all our poets, showing that you can
bank every time on the literary taste of the American Public.
Dear old Chum! That was when I was in Zenith to address
the national convention of Congregational Sunday-schools, I
happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on ‘The Morality oi
A i Health.’ So Chum wrote this poem about me:”

ARROWS MITH

197

Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,

The two-fisted fightin’ poet doc

Who stands for health like Gibraltar’s rock.

He’s jammed with figgers and facts and fun,

The plucky old, lucky old son — of — a — gun !

For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.

“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around.
And when I read a poem with such originality and swing,
when I find a genu-ine vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then
I realize that I’m not a poet at all, no matter how much my
jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of Health. My brain¬
children may teach sanitation and do their little part to save
thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what
Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a
plain scientist in an office.

“Still, you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine,
just by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody
in it, does gild the pill and make careless folks stop spitting
on the sidewalks, and get out into God’s great outdoors and
get their lungs packed full of ozone and lead a real hairy-
chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over the first
number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting —
I know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are
going to quote from it and so carry on the good work as well
as boost my circulation.”

He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled Pickerbaugh
Pickings.

In verse and aphorism, Pickings recommended good health,
good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality.
Dr. Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as
impressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used
at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item which showed
that among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and
Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-
three per cent, of the husbands drank at least one glass of
whisky daily.

Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched
Pickings from him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read
any more of my rot. You can look it over some future time.
But this second volume of my clippings may perhaps interest
you, just as a hint of what a fellow can do.”

ARRO WSMITH

198

While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin
realized that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than
he had realized. He was exposed as the founder of the first
Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent of the Jonathan Ed¬
wards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus; president
of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowl¬
ing Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club;
organizer and cheer-leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen,
Moose, Elks, Masons, Oddfellows, Turnverein, Knights of Co¬
lumbus, B’nai B’rith, and the Y. M. C. A.; and winner of the
prizes both for reciting the largest number of Biblical texts and
for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of the
Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups.

Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nau¬
tilus on “A Yankee Doctor’s Trip Through Old Europe,” and
the Mugford College Alumni Association on “Wanted: A Man-
sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford.” But outside of Nau¬
tilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.

He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly
Luncheon on “More Health — More Bank Clearings.” He had
edified the National Interurban Trolley Council, meeting at
Wichita, on “Health Maxims for Trolley Folks.” Seven thou¬
sand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had listened
to his observations on “Health First, Safety Second, and Booze
Nowhere A-tall.” And in a great convention at Waterloo
he had helped organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti¬
rum Minute Men.

The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers,
house organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accom¬
panied by photographs of himself, his buxom wife, and his
eight bounding daughters, depicted in Canadian winter cos¬
tumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy athletic
costumes, playing tennis in the backyard, and in costumes of
no known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background
of Northern Minnesota pines.

Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and
recover.

He walked back to the Sims House. He realized that to a
civilized man the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform
would be sufficient reason for ignoring it.

When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up,
cursed himself for what he esteemed his old sin of superiority

ARRO WSMITH

199

to decent normal people. . . . Failure. Disloyalty. In med¬
ical school, in private practise, in his bullying health admin¬
istration. Now again?

He urged, “This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh’s
is exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people
the scientific discoveries of the Max Gottliebs. What do I
care how much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sun¬
day School superintendents and other morons, as long as he
lets me alone and lets me do my work in the lab and dairy in¬
spection?”

He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and
confidently into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom
where Leora sat in a rocker by the window.

“Well?” she said.

“It’s fine — gave me fine welcome. And they want us to
come to dinner, to-morrow evening.”

“What’s he like?”

“Oh, he’s awfully optimistic — he puts things over — he —
Oh, Leora, am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten
failure again?”

His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affec¬
tion, the one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.

When the maples fluttered beneath their -window in the
breeze that sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when
the amiable citizens of Nautilus had driven home to supper in
their shaky Fords, Leora had persuaded him that Picker¬
baugh’s flamboyance would not interfere with his own work,
that in any case they would not remain in Nautilus forever,
that he was impatient, and that she loved him dearly. So they
descended to supper, an old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn
fritters and many little dishes which were of interest after the
loving but misinformed cooking of Leora, and they went to
the movies and held hands and were not ill content.

The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant.
He gave Martin a notion of the details of his work.

Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over
cut fingers and ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the
laboratory, emerging only to battle with factory-owners who
defied sanitation. But he found that it was impossible to de-

200

ARRO WSMITH

fine his work, except that he was to do a little of everything
that Pickerbaugh, the press, or any stray citizen of Nautilus
might think of.

He was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain
of everything from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer
parties of neighbors; he was to dictate office correspondence
to the touchy stenographer, who was not a Working Girl but
a Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give publicity to the news¬
papers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and report-blanks a.t
the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two part-time physi¬
cians in the city clinic; to direct the nurses and the two sani¬
tary inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to
arrest — or at least to jaw at— all public spitters; to leap into
a Ford and rush out to tack placards on houses in which were
infectious diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye on epi¬
demics from Vladivostok to Patagonia, and to prevent (by
methods not very clearly outlined) their coming in to slay the
yeomanry and even halt the business activities of Nautilus.

But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wasser-
manns for private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures
in suspected diphtheria.

“I get it,” said Leora, as they dressed for the dinner at
Pickerbaugh’s. “Your job will only take about twenty-eight
hours a day, and the rest of the time you’re perfectly welcome
to spend in research, unless somebody interrupts you.”

The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the
steeple-prickly West Side, was a Real Old-fashioned Home.
It was a wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather
mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor,
and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes along the
ridge-pole. Over the front gate was the name: uneedakest.

Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and
daughters. The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen
to the five-year-old twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly
curiosity and tried to talk all at once.

Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried
trustfulness. Her conviction that everything was all right was
constantly struggling with her knowledge that a great many
things seemed to be all wrong. She kissed Leora while Pick-

ARROWSMITH

201

erbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way
of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was
extraordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an ora¬
tion on the Home Nest:

“Here you’ve got an illustration of Health in the Home.
Look at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been
sick a day in their lives — practically — and though Mother
does have her sick-headaches, that’s to be attributed to the
early neglect of her diet, because while her father, the old
deacon — and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he
was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel
Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the
foundation of Mugford College but also the tradition of in¬
tegrity and industry which have produced our present pros¬
perity — BUT he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation, and
I’ve always thought — ”

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy,
Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

“I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them
My Jewels— I do so hate these conventional phrases that every¬
body uses, don’t you? — but that’s what they really are to their
mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished — Of
course when we’d started giving them floral names we had to
keep it up, but if we’d started with jewels, just think of all
the darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo
and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda
and Chrysoprase — it is Chrysoprase, isn’t it, not Chrysalis?
Oh, well, many people have congratulated us on their names
as it is. You know the girls are getting quite famous — their
pictures in so many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh Ladies’
Baseball Team all our own — only the Doctor has to play on
it now, because I’m beginning to get a little stout.”

Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters
apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager,
all musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-
minded. They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday
School, and to either the Y. W. C. A. or the Camp Fire Girls;
they were all fond of picnicking ; and they could all of them,
except the five-year -old twins, quote practically without error
the newest statistics showing the evils of alcohol.

202

ARROWSMITH

“In fact,” said Dr. Pickerbaugh, “we think they’re a very
striking brood of chickabiddies.”

“They certainly are!” quivered Martin.

“But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doc¬
trine of the Mens Sana in the Corpus Sano. Mrs. Pickerbaugh
and I have trained them to sing together, both in the home
and publicly, and as an organization we call them the Health-
6tt6 Octette.”

“Really?” said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin
had passed beyond speech.

“Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize
the name Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and
you’re going to see bands of happy young women going around
spreading their winged message into every dark corner.
Healthette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and enthu¬
siastic and good basket-ball players! I tell you, < they ll make
the lazy and wilful stir their stumps! They’ll shame the filthy
livers and filthy talkers into decency! I’ve already worked
out a poem-slogan for the Healthette Bands. Would you like
to hear it?

Winsome young womanhood wins with a smile
Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.

Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,

So against the evil-minded we’ll also make strife.

We’ll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet !
Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, I am a Healthette !

“But of course an even more important Cause is — and I
was one of the first to advocate it — having a Secretary of
Health and Eugenics in the cabinet at Washington — ”

On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a
stupendous dinner. With a hearty “Nonsense, nonsense, man,
of course you want a second helping — this is Hospitality Hall! ”
Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin and Leora with roast duck,
candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that they became dan¬
gerously ill and sat glassy-eyed. But Pickerbaugh himself did
not seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went
on discoursing till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet,
its Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of
cowpunchers, seemed to vanish, leaving him on a platform be¬
side a pitcher of ice-water.

Not always was he merely fantastic. “Dr. Arrowsmith, I

ARROWSMITH 203

tell you we’re lucky men to be able to get a living out of
doing our honest best to make the people in a he-town like
this well and vital. I could be pulling down eight or ten
thousand a year in private practise, and I’ve been told I
could make more than that in the art of advertising, yet I’m
glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to take a salary of
four thousand. Think of our having a job where we’ve got
nothing to sell but honesty and decency and the brotherhood
o’ man!”

f Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame
of the realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora,
and catching the first freight train out of Nautilus.

After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora,
in swarms. Martin had to take the twins on his knees and
tell them a story, ihey were remarkably heavy twins, but no
heavier than the labor of inventing a plot. Before they went
to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the famous Health
Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was
to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nau¬
tilus. It was set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic,” but as the twins’ voices were energetic and extraor¬
dinarily shrill, it had an effect all its own:

Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?

You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,

To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your health,
Then we’ll all go marching on.

A healthy mind in A clean body,

The slogan for one and all.

As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had
recently recited at the Congregational Festival, one of their
father’s minor lyrics:

What does little birdie say
On the sill at break o’ day?

“Hurrah for health in Nautilus
For Pa and Ma and all of us,

Hurray, hurray, hurray!”

“There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!” said Mrs.
Pickerbaugh. “Don’t you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they’re

204 ARROWSMITH

natural-born actresses? They’re not afraid of any audience,
and the way they throw themselves into it— perhaps not
Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York would
just love them, and maybe they’ve been sent to us to elevate

the drama. Upsy go.” .

During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.

Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. (“Of course
we all love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but
Verby is perhaps the only real musical genius in the family.”)
But the unexpected feature was Orchid’s cornet solo.

Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was
sniffily superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsyl-
vania, and surprisingly large portions of Zenith, cornet solos
were done by the most virtuous females. But he felt that he
had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.

“I’ve never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at
a drink and sober up,” he agonized. He made hysterical and
completely impractical plans for escape. Then Mrs. Picker-
baugh, returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the
harp.

While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into
a great dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her
as gay, good, dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic
young medical student, Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have
been a veritable girl of the late eighties and the early nineties,
the naive and idyllic age of Howells, when young men were
pure, when they played croquet and sang Swanee River ; a girl
who sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of lilacs,
and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would
have a nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would
become a missionary or a millionaire.

For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a
respectable heartiness into his “Enjoyed that s’ much.” He
felt victorious, and somewhat recovered from his weakness.

But the evening’s orgy was only begun.

They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora
did very badly indeed. They acted charades, at which Pick¬
erbaugh was tremendous. The sight of him on the floor in his
wife’s fur coat, being a seal on an ice-floe, was incomparable.
Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged twelve) had to pre¬
sent a charade, and there were complications.

Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pat-

ARROW SMITH

205

tings and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nine¬
teen and not altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-
minded and as devoted to Clean and Wholesome Novels as
Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it with frequency, but
she was not unconscious of young men, even though they were
married.

She planned to enact the word doleful , with a beggar asking
a dole, and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress,
she hugged Martin’s arm, frisked beside him, and murmured,
“Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad Daddy has you for assistant — some¬
body that’s young and good-looking. Oh, was that dreadful
of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and everything, and
the other assistant director — don’t tell Daddy I said so, but
he was an old crank!”

He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal
lips. As Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beg¬
gar, he was also conscious of ankles and young bosom. She
smiled at him, as one who had long known him, and said
loyally, “We’ll show ’em! I know you’re a dan-dy actor!”

When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm,
he took hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and
relinquished it with emphasis.

Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as
lover, as companion, as helper, that till this hour his most
devastating adventure had been a glance at a pretty girl in a
train. But the flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him.
He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped that he would not be
altogether rid of her, and for the first time in years he was
afraid of Leora’s eyes.

There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable promi¬
nence of Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing,
and who praised Martin’s feats in the game of “Follow the
Leader.”

All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest
of the fete consisted of what Pickerbaugh called “a little quiet
scientific conversation by the fireside,” made up of his obser¬
vations on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and
methods of letter filing in health departments. Through this
placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin
saw that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his hands,
and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought about the
innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.

206 ARROWSMITH

He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he
suffered a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever
from Pickerbaugh’s notes on the value of disinfectants. When
Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health
department thrice as large, with many full-time clinic and
school physicians and possibly Martin as director (Picker¬
baugh himself having gone off to mysterious and interesting
activities in a Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, “Yes,
that’d be — be fine,” while to himself he was explaining, “Damn
that girl, I wish she wouldn’t shake herself at me.”

At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life’s highest
ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.

They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid,
brisk in the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the
problem of his work in Nautilus.

“Lord, I don’t know whether I can do it. To work under
that gas-bag, with his fool pieces about boozers — ”

“They weren’t so bad,” protested Leora.

“Bad? Why, he’s probably the worst poet that ever lived,
and he certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought
any one- man could ever learn, all by himself. But when it
comes to this — what was it Clif Clawson used to call it? — by
the way, wonder what’s ever become of Clif; haven’t heard
from him for a couple o’ years — when it comes to this ‘over¬
powering Christian Domesticity’ — Oh, let’s hunt for a blind-
pig and sit around with the nice restful burglars.”

She insisted, “I thought his poems were kind of cute.”

“Cute! What a word!”

“It’s no worse than the cuss-words you’re always using!
But the cornet yowling by that awful oldest daughter — Ugh!”

“Well, now she played darn’ well!”

“Martin, the cornet is the kind of an instrument my brother
would play. And you so superior about the doctor’s poetry
and my saying ‘cute’! You’re just as much a backwoods hick
as I am, and maybe more so!”

“Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about noth¬
ing before! And can’t you understand how important — You
see, a man like Pickerbaugh makes all public health work
simply ridiculous by his circusing and his ignorance. If he
said that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making me
open my windows it’d make me or any other reasonable person

ARROWS MITH

207

close ’em. And to use the word ‘science’ in those flop-eared
limericks or whatever you call ’em — it’s sacrilege!”

“Well, if you want to know, Martin Arrowsmith, I’ll have no
more of these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically
hugging her when you came downstairs, and then mooning at
her all evening! I don’t mind your cursing and being cranky
and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of way, but ever
since the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, ‘I hope
you girls won’t mind, but I just happen to remember that I’m
engaged to both of you’ — You’re mine, and I won’t have any
trespassers. I’m a cavewoman, and you’d better learn it, and
as for that Orchid, with her simper and her stroking your arm
and her great big absurd feet — Orchid! She’s no orchid!
She’s a bachelor’s button!”

“But, honest, I don’t even remember which of the eight she
was.”

“Huh! Then you’ve been making love to all of ’em, that’s
why. Drat her! Well, I’m not going to go on scrapping
about it. I just wanted to warn you, that’s all.”

At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short,
jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt
with Orchid, he stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll
stay down and walk a little more. I’ve got to figure this health
department business out.”

He sat in the Sims House office — singularly dismal it was,
after midnight, and singularly smelly.

“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that
we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuber¬
culosis, for instance.

“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an
orchid — no, she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting
with. Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an
old doctor. I’ll be good, oh, I’ll be good, but — I’d like to
kiss her once, good! She likes me. Those darling lips, like
— like rosebuds!

“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous.
Well, she’s got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man
like — Lee, sweet, can’t you see, idiot, if I skipped round the
corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and
never anybody but you!

“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette

208

ARROWSMITH

stuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost
better to let ’em die than have to live and listen to—

“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you,
young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you
may recall the kind of books the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading
to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and —
Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar,
but — And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius — -

“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead
of Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him —

“Or does he pull the bunk, too?

“Now that’s just what I mean. That kind of phrase. ‘Pull
the bunk’! Horrible!

“Hell! I’ll use any kind of phrase I want to! I’m not one
of your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses,
for instance, and yet he’s used to all those highbrows —

“And I’ll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won’t even be
able to go on reading. Still — I don’t suppose they read much,
but there must be quite a few of these rich men here that know
about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.

“Rats!”

He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily
drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which
served as table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a
portrait of George Washington, was a policeman who, as he
gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:

“Say, ain’t you this new doctor that’s come to assist Picker¬
baugh? Seen you at City Hall.”

“Yes. Say, uh, say how does the city like Pickerbaugh?
How do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I’m just
starting in, and, uh — You get me.”

With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the
policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy
friendly cook of the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:

“Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal,
but he’s one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the
Queen’s English, and jever hear one of his poems? They’re
darn’ bright. I’ll tell you: There’s some people say Picker¬
baugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way I figure it,
course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it’d be all right if he
just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids’ teeth.
But there’s a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to

ARRO WSMITH

209

be jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so’s
they won’t go getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases
and pass ’em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc
Pickerbaugh is the boy that gets the idea into their noodles!

“Yes, sir, he’s a great old coot — he ain’t a clam like some of
these docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick
picnic, even if he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father Cos¬
tello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn’ if he didn’t
wrestle a fellow half his age, and awful’ near throw him, yes,
you bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for his
money all right! We fellows on the Force all like him, and we
have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us into
doing a lot of health work that by law we ain’t hardly supposed
to do, you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders.
You bet. He’s a real guy.”

“I see,” said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he
meditated:

“But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.

“Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!

“I’m not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.

“Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job — Huh! He’s
just the kind of jollying fourflusher that would climb! But
anyway, I’ll have my training then, and maybe I’ll make a
real health department here.

“Orchid said we’d go skating this winter —

“ Damn Orchid!”

CHAPTER XX

Martin found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief. He was
eager to have Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes
and Movements. His scientific knowledge was rather thinner
than that of the visiting nurses, but he had little jealousy, and
he demanded of Martin only the belief that a rapid and noisy
moving from place to place is the means (and possibly the end)
of Progress.

In a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but
a slight swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper
floor. There was a simple pleasantness in these continuous
lawns, these wide maple-shaded streets, and a joy in freedom
from the peering whisperers of Wheatsylvania.

Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of
Nautilus.

A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the
telephone to hear a masculine voice rasping:

“Hello, Martin? I bet you can’t guess who this is!”

Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, “You
win — g’ by!” and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a
new Assistant Director:

“No, I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Well, make a guess.”

“Oh— Clif Clawson?”

“Nope. Say, I see you’re looking fine. Oh, I guess I’ve got
you guessing this time! Goon! Have another try!”

The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin
had not yet learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her
presence. He said with a perceptible tartness:

“Oh, I suppose it’s President Wilson. Look here — ”

“Well, Mart, it’s Irve Watters! What do you know about
that! ”

Apparently the jester expected large gratification, but it
took ten seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters
might be. Then he had it: Watters, the appalling normal medi-

210

ARRO WSMITH

2 1 1

cal student whose faith in the good, the true, the profitable, had
annoyed him at Digamma Pi. He made his response as hearty
as he could:

“Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?”

“Why, I’m settled here. Been here ever since internship.
And got a nice little practise, too. Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters
and I want you and your wife — I believe you are married,
aren’t you? — to come up to the house for dinner, to-morrow
evening, and I’ll put you onto all the local slants.”

The dread of Watters’s patronage enabled Martin to lie
vigorously:

“Awfully sorry — awfully sorry — got a date for to-morrow
evening and the next evening.”

“Then come have lunch with me to-morrow at the Elks’
Club, and you and your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon.”

Hopelessly, “I don’t think I can make it for lunch but —
Well, we’ll dine with you Sunday.”

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discom¬
forting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never
were friends. Martin’s imaginative dismay at being caught
here by Watters was not lessened when Leora and he reluctantly
appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a fury of Old
Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.

Watters’s house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in
and leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practise
already become didactic and incredibly married; he had put on
weight and infallibility; and he had learned many new things
about which to be dull. Having been graduated a year earlier
than Martin and having married an almost rich wife, he was
kind and hospitable with an emphasis which aroused a desire
to do homicide. His conversation was a series of maxims and
admonitions:

“If you stay with the Department of Public Health for a
couple of years and take care to meet the right people, you’ll
be able to go into very lucrative practise here. It’s a fine
town — prosperous — so few dead beats.

“You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best
opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens. I’ve
picked up more than one high-class patient there.

“Pickerbaugh is a good active man and a fine booster but he’s
got a bad socialistic tendency. These clinics — outrageous —
the people that go to them that can afford to pay! Pauperize

212

ARROWSMITH

people. Now this may startle you — oh, you had a lot of crank
notions when you were in school, but you aren’t the only one
that does some thinking for himself! — sometimes I believe it’d
be better for the general health situation if there weren’t any
public health departments at all, because they get a lot of peo¬
ple into the habit of going to free clinics instead of to private
physicians, and cut down the earnings of the doctors and reduce
their number, so there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on
sickness.

“I guess by this time you’ve gotten over the funny ideas you
used to have about being practical-commercialism’ you used
to call it. You can see now that you’ve got to support your wife
and family, and if you don’t, nobody else is going to.

“Any time you want a straight tip about people here, you just
come to me. Pickerbaugh is a crank — he won’t give you the
right dope — the people you want to tie up with are the good,
solid, conservative, successful business men.”

Then Mrs. Watters had her turn. She was meaty with
advice, being the daughter of a prosperous person, none other
than Mr. S. A. Peaseley, the manufacturer of the Daisy Manure
Spreader.

“You haven’t any children?” she sobbed at Leora. “Oh, you
must! Irving and I have two, and you don’t know what an
interest they are to us, and they keep us so young.”

Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.

After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the “good
times we used to have together at the dear old U.” He took no
denial. “You always want to make folks think you’re eccen¬
tric, Mart. You pretend you haven’t any college patriotism,
but I know better — I know you’re showing off — you admire the
old place and our profs just as much as anybody. Maybe I
know you better than you do yourself! Come on, now; let’s
give a long cheer and sing ‘Winnemac, Mother of Brawny
Men.’ ”

And, “Don’t be silly; of course you’re going to sing,” said
Mrs. Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she
dealt in a firm manner.

When they had politely labored through the fried chicken
and brick ice cream, through the maxims, gurglings, and
memories, Martin and Leora went forth and spoke in tongues:

“Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him. I begin
to believe he has sense enough to come in when it rains.”

ARROWS M I TH 213

In their common misery they forgot that they had been agi¬
tated by a girl named Orchid.

Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was
drafted into many of the associations, clubs, lodges and
“causes” with which Nautilus foamed; into the Chamber of
Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, the Elks’ Club,
the Oddfellows, and the Evangeline County Medical society!
He resisted, but they said in a high hurt manner, “Why, my
boy, if you’re going to be a public official, and if you have the
slightest appreciation of their efforts to make you welcome
here — ”

Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that
they, who had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, com¬
plained now that they could have no quiet evenings at home.
But they fell into the habit of social ease, of dressing, of going
places without nervous anticipation. They modernized their
rustic dancing; they learned to play bridge, rather badly,
and tennis rather well ; and Martin, not by virtue and heroism
but merely by habit, got out of the way of resenting the chirp of
small talk.

. Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as
pirates, but considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they
were proteges of Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-
looking, and who, since they were patronized by Irving and
Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.

Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had
so thick a rind that it was impossible for him to understand
that Martin’s frequent refusals of his invitations could con¬
ceivably mean that he did not wish to come. He detected
traces of heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection, diligence,
and an extraordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the
work of salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other
guests by urging, “Come on now, Mart, let’s hear some of those
crazy ideas of yours!”

His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife.
Mrs. Watters had been reared by her father and by her hus¬
band to believe that she was the final fruit of the ages, and she
set herself to correct the barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She
rebuked Martin’s damns, Leora’s smoking, and both their

214 ARROWSMITH

theories of bidding at bridge. But she never nagged. To have
nagged would have been to admit that there were persons who
did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders,
brief, humorous, and introduced by a strident “Now don’t be
silly,” and she expected that to settle the matter.

Martin groaned, “Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and
Irve, it’s easier to become a respectable member of society
than to go on fighting.”

But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compul¬
sion to respectability as the charms of finding himself listened
to in Nautilus as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of
finding himself admired by Orchid.

He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of
syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wasser-
mann. His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming
used to the laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he
was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in securing publicity.
He was coaxed into making his first speech: an address on
“What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics” for the Sun¬
day Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope
Universalist Church.

He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on
the morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the
dreadful thing he would do this day, but he was desperate with
embarrassment when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.

People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He
quaked, “They’re coming to hear me, and I haven’t got a
darn’ thing to say to ’em!” It made him feel the more ridicu¬
lous that they who presumably wished to listen to him should
not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely shaking
hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, “You’ll find
plenty room right up the side aisles, young man.”

“I’m the speaker for the afternoon.”

“Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis
Street entrance, if you please, Doctor.”

In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and
a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of
Christian intellectuality.

They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women

ARROW SMITH

215

to meet him, they stood about him in a polite and twittery
circle, and dismayingly they expected him to say something
intelligent. Then, suffering, ghastly frightened, dumb, he was
led through an arched doorway into the auditorium. Millions
of faces were staring at his apologetic insignificance — faces in
the curving lines of pews, faces in the low balcony, eyes which
followed him and doubted him and noted that his heels were
run down.

The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.

The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course
opened with suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and
tried to look brazenly at the massed people who were looking
at him, while he sat nude and exposed and unprotected on the
high platform, the pastor made announcement of the Thursday
Missionary Supper and the Little Lads’ Marching Club. They
sang a brief cheerful hymn or two — Martin wondering whether
to sit or stand— and the chairman prayed that “our friend who
will address us to-day may have power to put his Message
across.” Through the prayer Martin sat with his forehead in
his hand, feeling foolish, and raving, “I guess this is the proper
attitude — they’re all gawping at me — gosh, won’t he ever quit?
— oh, damn it, now what was that point I was going to make
about fumigation? — oh, Lord, he’s winding up and I’ve got to
shoot! ”

Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it
for support, and his voice seemed to be going on, producing
reasonable words. The blur of faces cleared and he saw in¬
dividuals. He picked out a keen old man and tried to make him
laugh and marvel.

He found Leora, towrard the back, nodding to him, reassur¬
ing him. He dared to look away from the path of faces
directly in front of him. He glanced at the balcony —

The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest
about sera and vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that
churchly young man had noted two silken ankles distinguish¬
ing the front row of the balcony, had discovered that they be¬
longed to Orchid Pickerbaugh and that she was flashing down
admiration.

At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever
known — all lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that
kind of applause — and the chairman said the most flattering
things ever uttered, and the audience went out with the most

2l6

ARROWSMITH

remarkable speed ever witnessed, and Martin discovered himself
holding Orchid’s hand in the parlors while she warbled, in the
most adorable voice ever heard, “Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, you
were just wonderful! Most of these lecturers are old stuffs,
but you put it right over! I’m going to do a dash home and
tell Dad. He’ll be so tickled!”

Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the
parlors and was looking at them like a wife.

As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.

“Well, did you like my spiel?” he said, after a suitable time
of indignant waiting.

“Yes, it wasn’t bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk
to all those stupid people.”

“Stupid? What d’you mean by ‘stupid’? They got me
splendidly. They were fine.”

“Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won’t have
to keep up this silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself
talk too well to let you in on it very often.”

“I didn’t mind it. Fact, don’t know but what it’s a good
thing to have to express myself publicly now and then. Makes
you think more lucidly.”

“As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!”

“Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband
is a mutt, and no good outside the laboratory, but I do think
you might pretend to be a little enthusiastic over the first ad¬
dress he’s ever made — the very first he’s ev-er tackled — when
it went off so well.”

“Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I
thought you were terribly smart. It’s just — There’s other
things I think you can do better. What shall we do to-night;
have a cold snack at home or go to the cafeteria?”

Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all
the pleasures of inappreciation.

He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with
the coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly din¬
ners and safely wild bridge and their first evening at home,
their first opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling,
was on Friday. They sat down to what he announced as
“getting back to some real reading, like physiology and a little
of this fellow Arnold Bennett — nice quiet reading,” but which
consisted of catching up on the news notes in the medical
journals.

ARROWS MITH

217

He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He de¬
manded :

“What’re you going to wear at Pickerbaugh’s snow-picnic
to-morrow?”

“Oh, I haven’t — I’ll find something.”

“Lee, I want to ask you: Why the devil did you say I
talked too much at Dr. Strafford’s last evening? I know I’ve
got most of the faults going, but I didn’t know talking too much
was one of ’em.”

“It hasn’t been, till now.”

“‘Till now’!”

“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! You’ve been pouting
like a bad brat, all week. What’s the matter with you?”

“Well, I — Gosh, it makes me tired! Here everybody is so
enthusiastic about my Star of Hope spiel — that note in the
Morning Frontiersman, and Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it
was a corker — and you never so much as peep! ”

“Didn’t I applaud? But — It’s just that I hope you aren’t
going to keep up this drooling.”

“You do, do you! Well, let me tell you I am going to
keep it up! Not that I’m going to talk a lot of hot air. I gave
’em straight science, last Sunday, and they ate it up. I hadn’t
realized it isn’t necessary to be mushy, to hold an audience.
And the amount of good you can do! Why, I got across more
Health Instruction and ideas about the value of the lab in that
three-quarters of an hour than — I don’t care for being a
big gun but it’s fine to have people where they have to listen
to what you’ve got to say and can’t butt in, way they did in
Wheatsyl vania. You bet I’m going to keep up what you so
politely call my damn’ fool drooling — ”

“Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for
you. I can’t tell you — that’s one reason why I haven’t said
more about your talk — I can’t tell you how astonished I am to
hear you, who’re always sneering at what you call sentimen¬
tality, simply weeping over the Dear Little Tots!”

“I never said that — never used the phrase and you know it.
And by God! You talk about sneering! Just let me tell you
that the Public Health Movement, by correcting early faults in
children, by looking after their eyes and tonsils and so on, can
save millions of lives and make a future generation — ”

“I know it! I love children much more than you do! But
I mean all this ridiculous simpering — ”

2l8

ARROWS MITH

C£Well, gosh, somebody has to do it. You can’t work with
people till you educate ’em. There’s where old Pick, even if he
is an imbecile, does such good work with his poems and all that
stuff. Prob’ly be a good thing if I could write ’em — golly,
wonder if I couldn’t learn to?”

“They’re horrible!”

“Now there’s a fine consistency for you! The other evening
you called ’em ‘cute.’ ”

“I don’t have to be consistent. I’m a mere woman. You,
Martin Arrowsmith, you’d be the first to tell me so. And for
Dr. Pickerbaugh they’re all right, but not for you. You
belong in a laboratory, finding out things, not advertising them.
Do you remember once in Wheatsylvania for five minutes you
almost thought of joining a church and being a Respectable
Citizen? Are you going on for the rest of your life, stumbling
into respectability and having to be dug out again? Will you
never learn you’re a barbarian?”

“By God, I am! And — what was that other lovely thing you
called me? — I’m also, soul of my soul, a damn’ backwoods
hick! And a fine lot you help! When I want to settle down
to a decent and useful life and not go ’round antagonizing
people, you, the one that ought to believe in me, you’re the
first one to crab!”

“Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better.”

“She probably would! Believe me, she’s a darling, and she
did appreciate my spiel at the church, and if you think I’m
going to sit up all night listening to you sneering at my work
and my friends — I’m going to have a hot bath. Good night!”

In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have
been quarreling with Leora. Why! She was the only person
in the world, besides Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson
— by the way, where was Clif? still in New York? didn’t Clif
owe him a letter? but anyway — He was a fool to have lost his
temper, even if she was so stubborn that she wouldn’t adjust
her opinions, couldn’t see that he had a gift for influencing peo¬
ple. Nobody would ever stand by him as she had, and he loved
her —

He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances;
they told each other that they were the most reasonable persons
living; they kissed with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:

“Just the same, my lad, I’m not going to help you fool your¬
self. You’re not a booster. You’re a lie-hunter. Funny, you’d

ARROWSMITH

219

think to hear about these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb
and your old Voltaire, they couldn’t be fooled. But maybe
they were like you: always trying to get away from the tire¬
some truth, always hoping to settle down and be rich, always
selling their souls to the devil and then going and double¬
crossing the poor devil. I think — I think — ” She sat up in
bed, holding her temples in the labor of articulation. “You’re
different from Professor Gottlieb. He never makes mistakes
or wastes time on — ”

“He wasted time at Hunziker’s nostrum factory all right,
and his title is ‘Doctor,’ not ‘Professor,’ if you must give him
a — ”

“If he went to Hunziker’s he had some good reason. He’s
a genius; he couldn’t be wrong. Or could he, even he? But
anyway: you, Sandy, you have to stumble every so often; have
to learn by making mistakes. I will say one thing: you learn
from your crazy mistakes. But I get a little tired, sometimes,
watching you rush up and put your neck in every noose —
like being a blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid.”

“Well by golly! After I come in here trying to make peace!
It’s a good thing you never make any mistakes! But one per¬
fect person in a household is enough!”

He banged into bed. Silence. Soft sounds of “Mart —
Sandy I” He ignored her, proud that, he could be hard with
her, and so fell asleep. At breakfast, when he was ashamed
and eager, she was curt.

“I don’t care to discuss it,” she said.

In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the
Pickerbaughs’ snow picnic.

Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove
of oaks among the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of
them drove out in a bob-sled filled with straw and blue woolly
robes. The sleigh bells were exciting and the children leaped
out to run beside the sled.

The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora;
twice he tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost com¬
promising. In jealousy Martin turned openly and completely
to Orchid.

He grew interested in her not for the sake of disciplining

220

ARRO WSMITH

Leora but for her own rosy sweetness. She was wearing a
tweed jacket, with a tam, a flamboyant scarf, and the first
breeches any girl had dared to display in Nautilus. She patted
Martin’s knee, and when they rode behind the sled on a peril¬
ous toboggan, she held his waist, resolutely.

She was calling him “Dr. Martin” now, and he had come to

a warm “Orchid.” . .. _

At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation, to¬
gether Martin and Orchid carried in the hamper of food;
together they slid down the hillocks on skiis. When their
skiis were entangled, they rolled into a drift, and as she clung
to him, unafraid and unembarrassed, it seemed to him that in
the roughness of tweeds she was but the softer and more won¬
derful _ eyes fearless, cheeks brilliant as she brushed the coat¬

ing of wet snow from them, flying legs of a slim boy, shoulders
adorable in their pretense of sturdy boyishness—

But “I’m a sentimental fool! Leora was right!” he snarled
at himself. “I thought you had some originality! And poor
little Orchid — she’d be shocked if she knew how sneak-minded
you are!”

But poor little Orchid was coaxing, “Come on, Dr. Martin,
let’s shoot off that high bluff. We’re the only ones that have
any pep.”

“That’s because we’re the only young ones.”

“It’s because you’re so young. I’m dreadfully old. I just
sit and moon when you rave about your epidemics and things.”

He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was
sliding on a distant slope. It may have been pique and it may
have been relief that he was licensed to be alone with Orchid,
but he ceased to speak to her as though she were a child and
he a person laden with wisdom; ceased to speak to her as
though he were looking over his shoulder. They raced to the
high bluff. They skiied down it and fell ; they had one glorious
swooping slide, and wrestled in the snow.

They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away.
She stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse.
They ferreted out a thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her
as though he was going to kiss her, and she looked back at him
as though she did not mind. As they laid out the food they
hummed with the intimacy of understanding, and when she
trilled, “Now hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on that

ARROWSMITH 221

horrid old table,” it was as one who was content to be with him
forever.

They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands,
and as they rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness,
though they sat shoulder by shoulder he did not put his arms
about her except when the bob-sled slewed on sharp corners.
If Martin was exalted with excitement, it was presumably
caused by the wholesome exercises of the day. Nothing hap¬
pened and nobody looked uneasy. At parting all their fare¬
wells were cheery and helpful.

And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two
there was about her a chill air which the busy Martin did not
investigate.

CHAPTER XXI

Nautilus was one of the first communities in the country to
develop the Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have
Correspondence School Week, Christian Science Week, Oste¬
opathy Week, and Georgia Pine Week.

A Week is not merely a week.

If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church
or chamber of commerce or charity desires to improve it¬
self, which means to get more money, it calls in those few ener¬
getic spirits who run any city, and proclaims a Week. This
consists of one month of committee meetings, a hundred col¬
umns of praise for the organization in the public prints, and
finally a day or two on which athletic persons flatter inapprecia-
tive audiences in churches or cinema theaters, and the pret¬
tiest girls in town have the pleasure of being allowed to talk
to male strangers on the street corners, apropos of giving them
extremely undecorative tags in exchange for the smallest sums
which those strangers think they must pay if they are to be con¬
sidered gentlemen.

The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not
to acquire money immediately by the sale of tags but by general
advertising to get more of it later.

Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly
talking men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency
Engineers, went about giving advice to shopkeepers on how to
get money away from one another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh addressed a prayer-meeting on “The Pep of St.
Paul, the First Booster.” It had held a Gladhand Week, when
everybody was supposed to speak to at least three strangers
daily, to the end that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen
were backslapped all day long by hearty and powerful unknown
persons. There had also been an Old Home Week, a Write to
Mother Week, a We Want Your Factory in Nautilus Week, an
Eat More Corn Week, a Go to Church Week, a Salvation
Army Week, and an Own Your Own Auto Week.

222

ARROW SMITH

223

Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty
thousand dollars for a new Y. M. C. A. building.

On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, an¬
nouncing “You Must Come Across,” “Young Man Come
Along” and “Your Money Creates ’Appiness.” Dr. Picker-
baugh made nineteen addresses in three days, comparing the
Y. M. C. A. to the Crusaders, the Apostles, and the expeditions
of Dr. Cook — who, he believed, really had discovered the North
Pole. Orchid sold three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven
of them to the same man, who afterward made improper re¬
marks to her. She was rescued by a Y. M. C. A. secretary, who
for a considerable time held her hand to calm her.

No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the inven¬
tion of Weeks.

He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a
very good Week it was, but so hotly followed by Banish the
Booze Week, Tougher Teeth Week, and Stop the Spitter Week
that people who lacked his vigor were heard groaning, “My
health is being ruined by all this fretting over health.”

During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new
lyric of his own composition:

Germs come by stealth
And ruin health,

So listen, pard,

Just drop a card

To some man who’ll clean up your yard
And that will hit the old germs hard.

Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giv¬
ing prizes to the children who had slaughtered the most flies,
the inspiration for two verses. Posters admonished:

Sell your hammer and buy a horn,

But hang onto the old fly-swatter.

If you don’t want disease sneaking into the Home
Then to kill the fly you gotter !

It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding
a state convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh
telegraphed to them:

Just mention fly-prevention

At the good old Eagles’ convention.

ARRO WSMITH

224

This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in
Alaska, and waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to
Martin, “Now you see the way a fellow can get the truth
across, if he goes at it right.”

Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in
midsummer, was not altogether successful, partly because an
injudicious humorist on a local newspaper wanted to know
whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected all babes in arms to
smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly because the
cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health
with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thor¬
ough satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.

With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over
the Program Committee of the State Convention of Health
Officers and Agencies.

It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:

Brother Males and Shemales:

Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-
to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it’s going to be
Practical. We’ll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get
messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (.2)
home wid us.

Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there
to put Wim an Wigor nevery thing into the program. John F.
Zeisser, M.A., M.D., nail the rest of the alphabet (part your hair
Jack and look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a
coupla key-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From
time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive,
hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch
with Wild Wittles.

Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you’re next. Let’s
have those cards saying you’re coming.

This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons
of Clinton wrote to Pickerbaugh:

I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we
pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say
it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to
laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that
your letter was “undignified” ! Can you beat it ! I think people as
hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with the
dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool !

ARROW SMITH

225

Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora
and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts,
and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But
when it came to More Babies Week, then he was argumenta¬
tive. He believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh
answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own
eight beauties.

Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week.
He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who
spat tobacco juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing
these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed
with holy frenzy and bogus statistics.

Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any
hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been
natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spit¬
ting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his
honesty in making such crusades. He had the personal touchi¬
ness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was
sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. To
demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Ray¬
mond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact,
extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuber¬
culosis has declined” — this was to be a scoundrel who really
liked to befoul the pavements.

Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and
probably vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate
in tuberculosis certainly had decreased during Pickerbaugh’s
administration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate
in most villages of the district, with no speeches about spitting,
no Open Your Windows parades.

It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect
him to take much share in his publicity campaigns but rather
to be his substitute in the office during them. They stirred in
Martin the most furious and complicated thoughts that had
ever afflicted him.

Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, “What
if my statistics aren’t always exact? What if my advertising,
my jollying of the public, does strike some folks as vulgar?
It all does good; it’s all on the right side. No matter what

226

ARROWSMITH

methods we use, if we can get people to have more fresh air and
cleaner yards and less alcohol, we’re justified.”

To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it
really matter? Does truth matter — clean, cold, unfriendly
truth, Max Gottlieb’s truth? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t
tamper with the truth,’ and everybody is furious if you hint that
they themselves are tampering with it. Does anything matter,
except making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?

“I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn’t the de¬
sire for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another
man’s excitement about his golf? Anyway, I’m going to stick
by Picker baugh.”

To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the
attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as at¬
tacked Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would
be successful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while
Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.

He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh’s figures on bad
teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions
alone, every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty
per cent- chance of dying before the age of sixteen, and he could
not startle with much alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, “Do
you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in
Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-nine
and that they might all have been saved, yes, sir, saved, by a
daily cold shower?”

For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers,
even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen
men between the ages of seventeen and forty-two died of cold
showers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.

To Pickerbaugh the existence of “variables,” a word which
Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used “control,”
was without significance. That health might be determined
by temperature, heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity,
or by anything save health-department campaigns for increased
washing and morality, was to him inconceivable.

“Variables! Huh!” Pickerbaugh snorted. “Why, every en¬
lightened man in the public service knows enough about the
causes of disease — matter now of acting on that knowledge.”

When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very
little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools,
about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets, about the real

ARROWSMITH

227

danger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza
epidemics, about most of the things they tub-thumped in their
campaigns, Picker baugh merely became angry, and Martin
wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned
to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated
and wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smug¬
ness of his leaders.

He came to question what Pickerbaugh called “the proven
practical value” of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of
Pickerbaugh’s biology. He noted how bored were most of the
newspapermen by being galvanized into a new saving of the
world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was the
Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty
days had surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support
an association of which he had never heard.

But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which
he beheld in Pickerbaugh’s most ardent eloquence.

When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized,
that certain tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should
be burnt down instead of being fumigated in a fiddling useless
way, when he hinted that these attacks would save more lives
than ten thousand sermons and ten years of parades by little
girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain, then
Pickerbaugh worried, “No, no, Martin, don’t think we could do
that. Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the land¬
lords. Can’t accomplish anything in this work unless you keep
from offending people.”

When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle
he spoke of “the value of health in making life more joyful,”
but when he addressed a business luncheon he changed it to
“the value in good round dollars and cents of having workmen
who are healthy and sober, and therefore able to work faster
at the same wages.” Parents’ associations he enlightened upon
“the saving in doctors’ bills of treating the child before mal¬
adjustments go too far,” but to physicians he gave assurance
that public health»agitation would merely make the custom of
going regularly to doctors more popular.

To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor
Vaughan, and Edison as his masters, but in asking the business
men of Nautilus — the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Com¬
merce, the association of wholesalers — for their divine ap¬
proval of more funds for his department, he made it clear that

228

ARROWSMITH

they were his masters and lords of all the land, and fatly,
behind cigars, they accepted their kinghood.

Gradually Martin’s contemplation moved beyond Alums
Pickerbaugh to all leaders, of armies or empires, of universities
or churches, and he saw that most of them were Pickerbaughs.
He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to
him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful,
the gospel of not bawling gpspels, the wisdom of admitting the
probable ignorance of one’s self and of everybody else, and the
energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.

A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory.
He was summoned into the reception-room of the department
to explain to angry citizens why the garage next door to them
should smell of gasoline ; he went back to his cubbyhole to dic¬
tate letters to school -principals about dental clinics; he drove
out to Swede Hollow to see what attention the food and dairy
inspector had given to the slaughter-houses; he ordered a
family in Shantytown quarantined; and escaped at last into
the laboratory.

It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked. Martin had
little time for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wasser-
manns for the private physicians of the city, but the work
rested him, and now and then he struggled over a precipitation
test which was going to replace Wassermanns and make him
famous.

Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would
take six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and
with the present interruptions it would require two hundred,
by which time the Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis
and made the test useless.

To Martin’s duties was added the entertainment of Leora
in the strange city of Nautilus.

“Do you manage to keep busy all day?” he encouraged her,
and, “Any place you’d like to go this evening?”

She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and auto¬
matically contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never
before worried about her amusement.

ARROWS MITH

229

. The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Mar¬
tin’s laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll
tents out of filter paper. Orchid lettered the special posters for
her father’s Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quiet¬
est place in which to work. While Martin stood at his bench he
was conscious of her, humming at a table in the corner. They
talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm
to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have
greeted with “That’s a damn’ silly remark!”

He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the
light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid’s ankles as she
bent over the table, absurdly patient with her paint-brushes,
curling her legs in a fantastic knot.

Abruptly he asked her, “Look here, honey. Suppose you —
suppose a kid like you were to fall in love with a married man.
What d’you think she ought to do? Be nice to him? Or
chuck him?”

“Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she
suffered. Even if she liked him terribly. Because even if she
liked him, she oughtn’t to wrong his wife.”

“But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn’t care?”
He had stopped his pretense of working; he was standing
before her, arms akimbo, dark eyes demanding.

“Well, if she didn’t know— But it isn’t that. I believe mar¬
riages really and truly are made in Heaven, don’t you? Some
day Prince Charming will come, the perfect lover — ” She
was so young, her lips were so young, so very sweet! “ — and
of course I want to keep myself for him. It would spoil
everything if I made light of love before my Hero came.”

But her smile was caressing.

He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw
her parroted moralities forgotten. He went through a change
as definite as religious conversion or the coming of insane frenzy
in war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to
his wife, to a determination to take what he could get. He
began to resent Leora’s demand that she, who had eternally his
deepest love, should also demand his every wandering fancy.
And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she
could tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he
had spent an afternoon with the child. Her mute examination

230

ARROWSMITH

of him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous
was profuse and hearty as he urged her, “Been home all day?
Well, we’ll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or
shall we call up somebody and go see ’em? Whatever you’d
like.”

He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew
that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one
of his meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to
Pickerbaugh’s, he snarled, “You’re a fine bird to think about
truth, you liar!”

He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid’s
lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from
looking at them.

In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the
Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsyl vania for a fort¬
night with her family. Then she spoke:

“Sandy, I’m not going to ask you any questions when I come
back, but I hope you won’t look as foolish as you’ve been look¬
ing lately. I don t think that bachelor’s button, that ragweed,
that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling*

I do want you to be happy, but unless I up and die on you
some day, I’m not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn
you. Now about ice. I’ve left an order for a hundred pounds
a week, and if you want to get your own dinners some¬
times — ”

When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though
a good deal, was always about to happen. Orchid had the
flapper’s curiosity as to what a man was likely to do, but she
was satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.

Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and
a flirt, and he hadn’t the slightest intention of going near her.”
No! He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read
or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.

But at half-past eight he was loitering toward' her house.

If the elder Pickerbaughs were there — Martin could hear
himself saying, “Thought I’d just drop by, Doctor, and ask
you what. you thought about—” Hang it! Thought about
what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.

On the low fiont steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over
her was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.

Hello, Father in?” he cried, with a carelessness on which
he could but pride himself.

ARROWS MITH

231

“I’m terribly sorry; he and Mama won’t be back till eleven.
Won’t you sit down and cool off a little?”

“Well — ” He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youth¬
ful conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable,
in Charley’s opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid
made little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was
very intelligent.

“Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?” said
Martin.

“Oh, been getting in all I can,” said Charley. “How’s things
going at City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox
and winkulus pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?”

“Oh, keep busy,” grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.

He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley
and Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him
out and made him feel a hundred years old: references to
Mamie and Earl, and a violent “Yeh, that’s all right, but any
time you see me dancing with her you just tell me about it, will
yuh!” At the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping, and
observing, “Now you quit!” to persons unknown.

“Hell! It isn’t worth it! I’m going home,” Martin sighed,
but at the moment Charley screamed, “Well, ta, ta, be good;
gotta toddle along.”

He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather em¬
barrassing.

“It’s so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn’t
always try to flirt, like Charley,” said Orchid.

He considered, “Splendid! She’s going to be just a nice good
girl. And I’ve come to my senses. We’ll just have a little
chat and I’ll go home.”

She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, “I
was so lonely, especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I
heard your step on the walk. I knew it the second I heard it.”

He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent
than might have been expected from the assistant and friend
of her father, she withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and
began to chatter.

Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted
to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more in¬
calculable than the most complex woman. He managed to feel
guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being
guilty.

232 ARROWSMITH

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any
brains whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to at¬
tend a small Midwestern denominational college. Verbena
was going to college this autumn, but Orchid, she explained
thought she “ought to stay home and help Mama take care of
the chickabiddies.”

“Meaning,” Martin reflected, “that she can t even pass the
Mugford entrance exams!” But his opinion of her intelligence
was suddenly enlarged as she whimpered, “Poor little me,
prob’ly I’ll always stay here in Nautilus, while you— oh, with
your knowledge and your frightfully strong will-power, I know
you’re going to conquer the world!”

“Nonsense, I’ll never conquer any world, but I do hope to
pull off a few good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey,
do you think I have much will-power?”

The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. Tne
seedy Pickerbaugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass
was a garden of roses, the ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana,
the old hammock turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-
tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a fountain, and over
all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck love. The
little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children, was
stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to per¬
ceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in
irascible pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rap¬
ture.

He held Orchid’s quiet hand— and was lonely for Leora.

The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not
thought about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been
romantic. The Martin who, like a returned warrior scented
and enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in the moonlight, now
desirously lifted his face to romance and was altogether un¬
romantic.

He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but
when she sighed, “Oh, please don’t,” there was in him no
ruthlessness and no conviction with which to go on. He consid¬
ered the moonlight again, but also he considered being at the
office early in the morning, and he wondered if he could without
detection slip out his watch and see what time it was. He
managed it. He stooped to kiss her good-night, and somehow
didn’t quite kiss her, and found himself walking home.

ARROWS M ITH

233

As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regard¬
ing himself. He had never, he raged, however stumbling he
might have been, expected to find himself a little pilferer of
love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak, and not even successful
in his sneaking, less successful than the soda-clerks who
swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He told
himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom,
a sigher and drawer-out of her M’s and O’s, but once he was in
his lonely flat he longed for her, thought of miraculous and
completely idiotic ways of luring her here to-night, and went to
bed yearning, “Oh, Orchid — ”

Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and
soft summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came
swarming all over the laboratory and perched on the bench
with a whisk of stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized
her wrists, and kissed her as she deserved to be kissed.

He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened.
He stared at her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide,
lips uncertain.

“Oh!” she profoundly said.

Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:

“Martin — oh — my dear — do you think you ought to have
done that?”

He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there
was nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither labora¬
tory nor fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity
of their being together.

Suddenly she babbled, “I know there’s lots of conventional
people that would say we’d done wrong, and perhaps I’d have
thought so, one time, but — Oh, I’m terribly glad I’m liberal!
Of course I wouldn’t hurt dear Leora or do anything really
wrong for the world, but isn’t it wonderful that with so many
bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize
the call that strength makes to strength and — But I’ve
simply got to be at the Y. W. C. A. meeting. There’s a woman
lawyer from New York that’s going to tell us about the Modern
Woman’s Career.”

When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful
lover. “I’ve won her,” he gloated. . . . Probably never has
gloating been so shakily and badly done.

That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with

234 ARROWSMITH

Irvin0, Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor
from°the city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an

excited but saccharine:

“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?

“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make
it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile
the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.

“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?

“Tust uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards.

“Oh i” It was acute. “Oh, then you— I was such a baby
to call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody,
and it was such a lovely evening, and I just thought o
you think I’m an awful little silly?”

“No— no— sure not.” , , , ,.

“I’m so glad you don’t. I’d hate it if I thought you thought

I was just a silly to call you up. You don’t, do you?”

«No — no — course not. Look, I’ve got to — ”

“I know. I mustn’t keep you. But I just wanted you to tell
me whether you thought I was a silly to — ”

“No! HonestI Really!”

Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine
snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said
all the things considered suitable in Nautilus: “Oh, you little
Don Jewen!” and “Can you beat it— his wife only gone for a
week!” and “Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you tightwad, bring
her up here! ” and “Say, I know who it is; it’s that little milliner
on Prairie Avenue.”

Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lam
awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that
they “mustn’t ever do that sort of thing again” — and would he
meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue
at eight, so that they might talk it all over?

In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to
half-past eight.

At five she called him up just to remind him—

In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no
more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory
experimenter, too coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful
male, and all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.

“I can go as far as I like with her to-night.

“But she’s a brainless man-chaser.

“All the better. I’m tired of being a punk philosopher.

ARROWSMITH 235

“I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about
in all this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?

“I will not be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and
moral! It’s against my religion. I demand the right to be
free —

“Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are
just as bad as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound
natural immorality in me so I can afford to be moral. I want
to keep my brain clear for work. I don’t want it blurred by
dutifully running around trying to kiss everybody I can.

“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a
happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and
my work, and I’m not going to mess it. God help any
man that likes his work and his wife! He’s beaten from the
beginning.”

He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was
unkind. He was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of
two days ago and the prosy cautious Martin of to-night. He
went home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the
night.

A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.

He met her at the station.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I feel a hundred and seven years
old. I’m a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I’d
hate it, if it wasn’t for my precipitation test and you and —
Why do you always lose your trunk check? I suppose I am a
bad example for others, giving up so easily. No, no, darling,
can’t you see ; that’s the transportation check the conductor
gave you!”

CHAPTER XXII

This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his
wav through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa Nebraska, and
Kansas. Martin realized that though he seemed, in contrast to
Gustaf Sondelius, an unfortunately articulate and generous lout,
he was destined to be ten times better known m America than
Sondelius could ever be, a thousand times better known than

Max Gottlieb. ~ ,

He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-piated Great

Men whose pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the
magazines: the advertising men who wrote little books about
Pep and Optimism, the editor of the magazine which told
clerks how to become Goethes and Stonewall Jacksons by
studying correspondence-courses and never touching the man¬
hood-rotting beer, and the cornfield sage who was equally an
authority on finance, peace, biology, editing, Peruvian eth¬
nology, and making oratory pay. These intellectual rulers
recognized Pickerbaugh as one of them; they wrote quippish
letters to him: and when he answered he signed himself

“Pick,” in red pencil. .

The Onward March Magazine, which specialized in bi¬
ographies of Men Who Have Made Good, had an account of
Pickerbaugh among its sketches of the pastor who built his own
beautiful Neo-Gothic church out of tin cans, the lady who had
in seven years kept 2,698 factory-girls from leading lives of
shame, and the Oregon cobbler who had taught himself to read
Sanskrit, Finnish, and Esperanto.

“Meet OP Doc Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum
Frink has hailed as ‘the two-fisted, fighting poet-doc,’ a sci¬
entist who puts his remarkable discoveries right over third
base, yet who, as a reg-lar old-fashioned Sunday-school super¬
intendent, rebukes the atheistic so-called scientists that are
menacing the foundations of our religion and liberties by their
smart-aleck cracks at everything that is noble and improving,
chanted the chronicler.

236

ARROWS MITH

237

Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that it was
actually exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a
million circulation, when Pickerbaugh summoned him.

“Mart,” he said, “do you feel competent to run this Depart¬
ment?”

“Why, uh— ”

“Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean
city all by yourself?”

“Why, uh— ”

“Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the
next congressman from this district!”

“Really?”

“Looks that way. Boy, I’m going to take to the whole na¬
tion the Message I’ve tried to ram home here!”

Martin got out quite a good “I congratulate you.” He was
so astonished that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment
of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelli¬
gence and importance.

“I’ve just been in conference with some of the leading Re¬
publicans of the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha!
Maybe they picked me because they haven’t anybody else to
run this year. Ha, ha, ha!”

Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that
was not exactly the right response, but he recovered and
caroled on:

“I said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not
sure I possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who
shall have the high privilege of laying down, at Washington,
the rules and regulations for the guidance, in every walk of
life, of this great nation of a hundred million people. However,
gentlemen,’ I said, ‘the impulse that prompts me to consider,
in all modesty, your unexpected and probably undeserved
honor is the fact that it seems to me that what Congress
needs is more forward-looking scientists to plan and more
genu-ine trained business men to execute the improvements
demanded by our evolving commonwealth, and also the possi¬
bility of persuading the Boys there at Washington of the pre¬
eminent and crying need of a Secretary of Health who shall
completely control — ’ ”

But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republi¬
cans really did nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.

238

ARROWSMITH

While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in
charge of the Department, and he began his reign by getting
himself denounced as a tyrant and a radical.

There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than
that of old Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus.. It was tiled
and drained and excellently lighted; the milking machines
were perfect; the bottles were super-boiled; and Klopchuk wel¬
comed inspectors and the tuberculin test. He had fought the
dairymen’s union and kept his dairy open-shop by paying
more than the union scale. Once, when Martin attended a
meeting of the Nautilus Central Labor Council as Picker-
bau^h’s representative, the secretary of the council confessed
that there was no plant which they would so like to unionize
and which they were so unlikely to unionize as Klopchuk s

D Now Martin’s labor sympathies were small. Like most labo¬
ratory men, he believed that the reason why workmen found
less joy in sewing vests or in pulling a lever than he did in
a long research was because they were an inferior race, born
lazy and wicked. The complaint of the unions was the one
thing to convince him that at last he had found perfection.

Often he stopped at Klopchuk’s merely for the satisfaction
of it. He noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker
had a persistent sore throat. He examined the man, made
cultures, and found hemolytic streptococcus. In a panic he
hurried ’back to the dairy, and after cultures he discovered
that there was streptococcus in the udders of three cows.

When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation
through all the smaller towns in the congressional district and
had returned to Nautilus, Martin insisted on the quarantine
of the infected milker and the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy
till no more infection should be found. #

“Nonsense! Why, that’s the cleanest place in the city,
Pickerbaugh scoffed. “Why borrow trouble? There s no sign
of an epidemic of strep.”

“There darn’ well will be! Three cows infected. Look at
what’s happened in Boston and Baltimore, here recently. I’ve
asked Klopchuk to come in and talk it over.”

“Well, you know how busy I am, but — ”

Klopchuk appeared at eleven, and to Klopchuk the affair

ARROWSMITH

239

was tragic. Born in a gutter in Poland, starving in New York,
working twenty hours a day in Vermont, in Ohio, in Iowa, he
had made this beautiful thing, his dairy.

Seamed, drooping, twirling his hat, almost in tears, he pro¬
tested, “Dr. Pickerbaugh, I do everything the doctors say is
necessary. I know dairies! Now comes this young man and
he says because one of my men has a cold, I kill little children
with diseased milk! I tell you, this is my life, and I would
sooner hang myself than send out one drop of bad milk. The
young man has some wicked reason. I have asked questions.
I find he is a great friend from the Central Labor Council.
Why, he go to their meetings! And they want to break me!”

To Martin the trembling old man was pitiful, but he had
never before been accused of treachery. He said grimly:

“You can take up the personal charges against me later,
Dr. Pickerbaugh. Meantime I suggest you have in some
expert to test my results; say Long of Chicago or Brent of
Minneapolis or somebody.”

“I — I — I — ” The Kipling and Billy Sunday of health looked
as distressed as Klopchuk. “I’m sure our friend here doesn’t
really mean to make charges against you, Mart. He’s over¬
wrought, naturally. Can’t we just treat the fellow that has
the strep infection and not make everybody uncomfort¬
able?”

“All right, if you want a bad epidemic here, toward the end
of your campaign!”

“You know cussed well I’d do anything to avoid — Though
I want you to distinctly understand it has nothing to do with
my campaign for Congress! It’s simply that I owe my city
the most scrupulous performance of duty in safeguarding it
against disease, and the most fearless enforcement — ”

At the end of his oratory Pickerbaugh telegraphed to Dr.
J. C. Long, the Chicago bacteriologist.

Dr. Long looked as though he had made the train journey
in an ice-box. Martin had never seen a man so free from
the poetry and flowing philanthropy of Almus Pickerbaugh.
He was slim, precise, lipless, lapless, and eye-glassed, and his
hair was parted in the middle. He coolly listened to Martin,
coldly listened to Pickerbaugh, icily heard Klopchuk, made
his inspection, and reported, “Dr. Arrowsmith seems to know
his business perfectly, there is certainly a danger here, I
advise closing the dairy, my fee is one hundred dollars, thank

240

ARROWSMITH

you no I shall not stay to dinner I must catch the evening
train

Martin went home to Leora snarling, “That man was just
as lovable as a cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his
freedom from bunk he’s made me wild to get back to research;
away from all these humanitarians that are so busy hollering
about loving the dear people that they let the people die! I
hated him, but — Wonder what Max Gottlieb’s doing this
evening? The old German crank! 1 11 bet 1 11 bet he s talk¬
ing music or something with some terrible highbrow bunch.
Wouldn’t you like to see the old coot again? You know, just
couple minutes. D’l ever tell you about the time ^ made
the dandy stain of the trypanosomes — Oh, did I?”

He assumed that with the temporary closing of the dairy the
matter was ended. He did not understand how hurt was Rlop-
chuk. He knew that Irving Watters, Klopchuk’s physician,
was unpleasant when they met, grumbling, “What’s the use
going on being an alarmist, Mart?” But he did not know how
many persons in Nautilus had been trustily informed that this
fellow Arrowsmith was in the pay of labor-union thugs.

Two months before, when Martin had been making his an¬
nual inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold,
the president (by inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company.
He had heard that Tredgold, an elaborate but easy-spoken man
of forty-five, moved as one clad in purple on the loftiest planes
of Nautilus society. After the inspection Tredgold urged, “Sit
down, Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about sanitation.”

Martin was wary. There was in Tredgold’s affable eye a
sardonic flicker.

“What d’you want to know about sanitation?”

“Oh, all about it.”

“The only thing I know is that your men must like you. Of
course you haven’t enough wash-bowls in that second-floor
toilet room, and the whole lot of ’em swore you were putting
in others immediately. If they like you enough to lie against
their own interests, you must be a good boss, and I think I’ll
let you get away with it — till my next inspection! Well, got
to hustle.”

Tredgold beamed on him. “My dear man, I’ve been pulling

ARROWSMITH

241

that dodge on Pickerbaugh for three years. I’m glad to have
seen you. And I think I really may put in some more bowls —
just before your next inspection. Good-by!”

After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered
Clay Tredgold and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in
front of a motion-picture theater.

“Give you a lift, Doctor?” cried Tredgold.

On the way he suggested, “I don’t know whether you’re
dry, like Pickerbaugh, but if you’d like I’ll run you out to
the house and present you with the noblest cocktail conceived
since Evangeline County went dry. Does it sound reason¬
able?”

“I haven’t heard anything so reasonable for years,” said
Martin.

The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty
feet above the general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove,
which is the Back Bay of Nautilus. It was a Colonial struc¬
ture, with a sun-parlor, a white-paneled hall, and a blue and
silver drawing-room. Martin tried to look casual as they
were wafted in on Mrs. Tredgold’s chatter, but it was the
handsomest house he had ever entered.

While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of
one likely to be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward
like a hostess, Tredgold flourished the cocktail-shaker and per¬
formed courtesies:

“How long you been here now, Doctor?”

“Almost a year.”

“Try that. Look here, it strikes me you’re kind of different
from Salvation Pickerbaugh.”

Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora’s
gratified amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something
like Pickerbaugh ’s best manner:

“Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which
there is no other that has so largely contributed to the pros¬
perity of our commonwealth, while I realize that you are get¬
ting away with every infraction of the health laws that the
inspector doesn’t catch you at, yet I desire to pay a tribute
to your high respect for sanitation, patriotism, and cocktails,
and if I only had an assistant more earnest than young Arrow-
smith, I should, with your permission, become President of the
United States.”

Tredgold clapped. Mrs. Tredgold asserted, “If that isn’t

242

ARROWSMITH

exactly like Dr. Pickerbaugh!” Leora looked proud, and so

did her husband. _ . t „

“I’m glad you’re free from this socialistic clap-trap ol ricKer-

baugh’s said Tredgold. , , , .

The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in

“Oh I don’t care a hang how socialistic he is — whatever that
means’ Don’t know anything about socialism. But since I ve
gone and given an imitation of him— I suppose it was prob¬
ably disloyal— I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that s
so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts. But mmd you,
Tredgold, it’s partly the fault of people like your Manufac¬
turers’ Association. You encourage him to rant. I’m a labora-
tory man — or rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal

with exact figures.” . . „ . ,

“So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams, said

Tredgold.

Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning tne
universities for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin
found himself becoming confidential about “variables,” and
Tredgold proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the
ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.

Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how
cautiously the wife of an assistant director has to economize,
and with that caressing voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted,
“I know. I was horribly hard-up after Dad died. Have you
tried the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins Street, two
doors from the Catholic church? She’s awfully clever, and so
cheap.”

Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house
in which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a
woman with the easy smartness which she had always feared
and hated, the first woman to whom she could talk of God and
the price of toweling. They came out from themselves and
were not laughed at.

It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology
and toweling were becoming pallid, that outside the house
sounded a whooping, wheezing motor horn, and in lumbered a
ruddy fat man who was introduced as Mr. Schlemihl, president
of the Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.

Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ash¬
ford Grove aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invading

ARROWSMITH

243

barbarian in the blue and silver room, Schlemihl was cordial:

“Glad meet yuh, Doctor. Well, say, Clay, I’m tickled to
death you’ve found another highbrow to gas with. Me, Arrow-
smith, I’m simply a poor old insurance salesman. Clay is al¬
ways telling me what an illiterate boob I am. Look here, Clay
darling, do I get a cocktail or don’t I? I seen your lights!
I seen you in here telling what a smart guy you are! Come
on! Mix!”

Tredgold mixed, extensively. Before he had finished, young
Monte Mugford, great-grandson of the sainted but side-whis¬
kered Nathaniel Mugford who had founded Mugford College,
also came in, uninvited. He wondered at the presence of Mar¬
tin, found him human, told him he was human, and did his
rather competent best to catch up on the cocktails.

Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was
singing to a commendatory audience the ballad he had learned
from Gustaf Sondelius:

She’d a dark and a roving eye,

And her hair hung down in ringlets,

A nice girl, a decent girl.

But one of the rakish kind.

At four, the Arrowsmiths had been accepted by the most
desperately Smart Set of Nautilus, and at four-thirty they
were driven home, at a speed neither legal nor kind, by Clay
Tredgold.

There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis
of what they called Society, but there was also a tribe of per¬
haps twelve families in the Ashford Grove section who, though
they went to the country club for golf, condescended to other
golfers, kept to themselves, and considered themselves as be¬
longing more to Chicago than to Nautilus. They took turns
in entertaining one another. They assumed that they were
all welcome at any party given by any of them, and to none of
their parties was any one outside the Group invited except
migrants from larger cities and occasional free lances like
Martin. They were a tight little garrison in a heathen town.

The members of the Group were very rich, and one of them,
Montgomery Mugford, knew something about his great-grand-

ARRO WSMITH

244

father. They lived in Tudor manor houses and Italian villas
so new that the scarred lawns had only begun to grow. They
had large cars and larger cellars, though the cellars contained
nothing but gin, whisky, vermouth, and a few sacred bottles
of rather sweet champagne. Every one in the Group was
familiar with New York — they stayed at the St. Regis or the
Plaza and went about buying clothes and discovering small
smart restaurants — and five of the twelve couples had been in
Europe; had spent a week in Paris, intending to go to art gal¬
leries and actually going to the more expensive fool-traps of
Montmartre.

In the Group Martin and Leora found themselves welcomed
as poor relations. They were invited to choric dinners, to
Sunday lunches at the country club. Whatever the event, it
always ended in rapidly motoring somewhere, having a num¬
ber of drinks, and insisting that Martin again “give that imita¬
tion of Doc Pickerbaugh.”

Besides motoring, drinking, and dancing to the Victrola, the
chief diversion of the Group was cards. Curiously, in this com¬
pletely unmoral set, there were no flirtations; they talked with
considerable freedom about “sex,” but they all seemed mono-
gamic, all happily married or afraid to appear unhappily mar¬
ried. But when Martin knew them better he heard murmurs
of husbands having “times” in Chicago, of wives picking up
young men in New York hotels, and he scented furious restless¬
ness beneath their superior sexual calm.

It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted
as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to
everything about astronomy except studying it, or Monte Mug-
ford as the highly descended aristocrat, but he did admire the
Group’s motor cars, shower baths, Fifth Avenue frocks, tweed
plus-fours, and houses somewhat impersonally decorated by
daffodillic young men from Chicago. He discovered sauces
and old silver. He began to consider Leora’s clothes not
merely as convenient coverings, but as a possible expression of
charm, and irritably he realized how careless she was.

In Nautilus, alone, rarely saying much about herself, Leora
had developed an intense mute little life of her own. She be¬
longed to a bridge club, and she went solemnly by herself to
the movies, but her ambition was to know France and it en¬
grossed her. It was an old desire, mysterious in source and
long held secret, but suddenly she was sighing:

ARROW SMITH

245

“Sandy, the one thing I want to do, maybe ten years from
now, is to see Touraine and Normandy and Carcassonne.
Could we, do you think?”

Rarely had Leora asked for anything. He was touched and
puzzled as he watched her reading books on Brittany, as he
caught her, over a highly simplified French grammar, breathing
“J’ay — j’aye — damn it, whatever it is!”

He crowed, “Lee, dear, if you want to go to France —
Listen ! Some day we’ll shoot over there with a couple of knap¬
sacks on our backs, and we’ll see that ole country from end to
end!”

Gratefully yet doubtfully: “You know if you got bored,
Sandy, you could go see the work at the Pasteur Institute.
Oh, I would like to tramp, just once, between high plastered
walls, and come to a foolish little cafe and watch the men
with funny red sashes and floppy blue pants go by. Really,
do you think maybe we could?”

Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group,
though she possessed nothing of what Martin called their
“elegance.” She always had at least one button missing. Mrs.
Tredgold, best natured as she was least pious of women,
adopted her complete.

Nautilus had always doubted Clara Tredgold. Mrs. Almus
Pickerbaugh said that she “took no part in any movement for
the betterment of the city.” For years she had seemed con¬
tent to grow her roses, to make her startling hats, to almond-
cream her lovely hands, and listen to her husband’s improper
stories — and for years she had been a lonely woman. In Leora
she perceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The
two women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading,
doing their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting
each other.

With the other women of the Group Leora was never so
intimate as with Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more
because she was a heretic whose vices, her smoking, her in¬
dolence, her relish of competent profanity, disturbed Mrs.
Pickerbaugh and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group rather ap¬
proved all unconventionalities — except such economic uncon¬
ventionalities as threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea,
or a cocktail, alone with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford,
who had been the lightest-footed debutante in Des Moines four
years before and who hated now the coming of her second

246 ARROWSMITH

baby; and it was to Leora that Mrs. Schlemihl, though pub¬
licly she was rompish and serene with her porker of a husband,
burst out, “If that man would only quit pawing me— reach¬
ing for me— slobbering on me! I hate it here! I will have
my winter in New York — alone! ”

The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora s
old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the
Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her
hair like a crow’s nest, he worried, and said things about her
“sloppiness” which he later regretted.

“Why can’t you take a little time to make yourself attrac¬
tive? God knows you haven’t anything else to do! Great
Jehoshaphat, can’t you even sew on buttons?”

But Clara Tredgold laughed, “Leora, I do think you have
the sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before
the others come?”

It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs.
Schlemihl had worn the new frock from Lucile’s and Jack
Brundidge (by day vice-president and sales-manager of the
Maize Mealies Company) had danced what he belligerently as¬
serted to be a Finnish polka, that when Martin and Leora were
driving home in a borrowed Health Department car he snarled,
“Lee, why can’t you ever take any trouble with what you
wear? Here this morning — or yesterday morning — you were
going to mend that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out
you haven’t done a darn’ thing the whole day but sit around
and read, and then you come out with that ratty embroidery — ”

“Will you stop the car!” she cried.

He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously
important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak
reach of gravel road.

She demanded, “Do you want me to become a harem
beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I’ve never taken
the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won’t go on fighting with you.
Either I’m the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I’m nothing.
What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara
Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where
we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other? You
do such a lot of worrying. I’m tired of it. Come on now.
What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything but you. But can’t you understand
— I’m not just a climber — I want us both to be equal to any-

ARROWS MITH

247

thing we run into. I certainly don’t see why we should be in¬
ferior to this bunch, in anything. Darling, except for Clara,
maybe, they’re nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we’re real

soldiers of fortune. Your France that you love so much _

some day we’ll go there, and the French President will be at
the N. P. depot to meet us! Why should we let anybody do
anything better than we can? Technique!” «

They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the
poisonous lines of barbed wire.

Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged,
with the wistfulness of youth, “Oh, Dr. Martin, aren’t you
ever coming to the house again?” he kissed her so briskly,
so cheerfully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was
unimportant.

Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director
of the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, “Your work
is very satisfactory. There’s only one thing you lack, my
boy: enthusiasm for getting together with folks and giving
a long pull and a strong pull, all together. But perhaps that’ll
come to you when you have more responsibility.”

Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong
pulls all together, but he felt like a man who has been dra¬
gooned into wearing yellow tights at a civic pageant.

“Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director,” he
fretted. “I wonder if there’s people who become what’s called
‘successful5 and then hate it? Well, anyway, I’ll start a decent
system of vital statistics in the department before they get me.
I won’t lay down! I’ll fight! I’ll make myself succeed!”

CHAPTER XXIII

It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of
inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever
again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little
reasonable publicity for his congressional campaign, but cer¬
tainly the Health Fair which the good man organized was over¬
powering.

He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen;
he bullied all the churches and associations into cooperation;
he made the newspapers promise to publish three columns of
praise each day.

He rented the rather dilapidated wooden “tabernacle” in
which the Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had re¬
cently wiped out all the sin in the community. He arranged
for a number of novel features. The Boy Scouts were to give
daily drills. There was a W. C. T. U. booth at which cele¬
brated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate
the evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting
Martin (in a dinky white coat) was to do jolly things with
test-tubes. An anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill
a mouse every half-hour by injecting ground-up cigarette paper
into it. The Pickerbaugh twins, Arbuta and Gladicla, now
aged six, were to show the public how to brush its teeth, and in
fact they did, until a sixty-year-old farmer of whom they had
lovingly inquired, “Do you brush your teeth daily?” made
thunderous answer, “No, but I’m going to paddle your bot¬
toms daily, and I’m going to start in right now.”

None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Fam¬
ily, who had volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a
day, an example of the benefits of healthful practises.

They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful
and powerful that they had recently been presenting refined
acrobatic exhibitions on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of
them smoked, drank, spit upon pavements, used foul language,
or ate meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to them the chief booth,

248

ARROWSMITH 249

on the platform once sacerdotally occupied by the Reverend
Mr. Sunday.

There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and ban¬
ners and leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held
song recitals, and daily there were lectures, most of them by
Pickerbaugh or by his friend Dr. Bissex, football coach and
professor of hygiene and most other subjects in Mugford Col¬
lege.

A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the gov¬
ernor of the state, were invited to come and “give their mes¬
sages,” but it happened, unfortunately, that none of them
seemed able to get away that particular week.

The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There
was a slight misunderstanding the first day. The Master
Bakers’ Association spoke strongly to Pickerbaugh about the
sign ‘'Too much pie makes pyorrhea” on the diet booth. But
the thoughtless and prosperity-destroying sign was removed at
once, and the Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery
in town.

The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin.
Pickerbaugh had fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory
which, except that it had no running water and except that
the fire laws forbade his using any kind of a flame, was exactly
like a real one. All day long he poured a solution of red ink
from one test-tube into another, with his microscope care¬
fully examined nothing at all, and answered the questions of
persons who wished to know how you put bacterias to death
once you had caught them swimming about.

Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a
nurse’s costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low
cursing. They found one friend, the fireman on duty, a splen¬
did person with stories about pet cats in the fire-house and no
tendency to ask questions in bacteriology. It was he who
showed them how they could smoke in safety. Behind the
Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature
Dirty House with red arrows to show where a fire might start
and an extremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove
with a broken window which would carry off the smoke of their
cigarettes. To this sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored
fireman retired a dozen times a day, and thus wore through
the week.

One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant,

250

ARROWSMITH

coming in not to detect but to see the charming spectacle of
the mouse dying in agony from cigarette paper, stopped before
the booth of the Eugenic Family, scratched his head, hastened
to the police station, and returned with certain pictures. He
growled to Pickerbaugh:

“Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don’t smoke or booze or any¬
thing?”

“Absolutely! And look at their perfect health.

“Hm. Better keep an eye on ’em. I won’t spoil your show,
Doc — we fellows at City Hall had all ought to stick together.
I won’t run ’em out of town till after the Fair. But they’re the
Holton gang. The man and woman ain’t married, and only
one of the kids is theirs. They’ve done time for selling licker
to the Indians, but their specialty, before they went into edu¬
cation, used to be the badger game. I’ll detail a plain-clothes
man to keep ’em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc.
Ought to give this city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-
date health methods. Good luck! Say, have you picked your
secretary yet, for when you get to Congress? I’ve got a
nephew that’s a crackajack stenographer and a bright kid
and knows how to keep his mouth shut about stuff that don t
concern him. I’ll send him around to have a talk with you.
So long.”

But, except that once he caught the father of the Eugenic
Family relieving the strain of being publicly healthy by taking
a long, gurgling, ecstatic drink from a flask, Pickerbaugh found
nothing wrong in their conduct, till Saturday. There was noth¬
ing wrong with anything, till then.

Never had a Fair been such a moral lesson, or secured so
much publicity. Every newspaper in the congressional district
gave columns to it, and all the accounts, even in the Demo¬
cratic papers, mentioned Pickerbaugh’s campaign.

Then, on Saturday, the last day of the Fair, came tragedy.

There was terrific rain, the roof leaked without restraint, and
the lady in charge of the Healthy Housing Booth, which also
leaked, was taken home threatened with pneumonia. At noon,
when the Eugenic Family were giving a demonstration of per¬
fect vigor, their youngest blossom had an epileptic fit, and be¬
fore the excitement was over, upon the Chicago anti-nicotine
lady as she triumphantly assassinated a mouse charged an anti-
vivisection lady, also from Chicago.

Round the two ladies and the unfortunate mouse gathered a

ARRO WSMITH

251

crowd. The anti- vivisection lady called the anti-nicotine lady
a murderer, a wretch, and an atheist, all of which the anti-nico¬
tine lady endured, merely weeping a little and calling for the
police. But when the anti-vivisection lady wound up, “And as
for your pretensions to know anything about science, you’re
no scientist at all!” then with a shriek the anti-nicotine lady
leaped from her platform, dug her fingers into the anti-vivi¬
section lady’s hair, and observed with distinctness, “I’ll show
you whether I know anything about science! ”

Pickerbaugh tried to separate them. Martin, standing hap¬
pily with Leora and their friend the fireman on the edge, dis¬
tinctly did not. Both ladies turned on Pickerbaugh and de¬
nounced him, and when they had been removed he was the
center of a thousand chuckles, in decided danger of never going
to Congress.

At two o’clock, when the rain had slackened, when the after¬
lunch crowd had come in and the story of the anti ladies was
running strong, the fireman retired behind the Clean Up and
Prevent Fires exhibit for his hourly smoke. He was a very
sleepy and unhappy little fireman; he was thinking about the
pleasant fire-house and the unending games of pinochle. He
dropped the match, unextinguished, on the back porch of the
model Clean House. The Clean House had been so hand¬
somely oiled that it was like kindling soaked in kerosene. It
flared up, and instantly the huge and gloomy Tabernacle was
hysterical with flames. The crowd rushed toward the exits.

Naturally, most of the original exits of the Tabernacle had
been blocked by booths. There was a shrieking panic, and
children were being trampled.

Almus Pickerbaugh was neither a coward nor slothful. Sud¬
denly, coming from nowhere, he was marching through the
Tabernacle at the head of his eight daughters, singing “Dixie,”
his head up, his eyes terrible, his arms wide in pleading. The
crowd weakly halted. With the voice of a clipper captain he
unsnarled them and ushered them safely out, then charged
back into the spouting flames.

The rain-soaked building had not caught. The fireman,
with Martin and the head of the Eugenic Family, was beating
the flames. Nothing was destroyed save the Clean House, and
the crowd which had fled in agony came back in wonder. Their
hero was Pickerbaugh.

Within two hours the Nautilus papers vomited specials which

252

ARROWSMITH

explained that not merely had Pickerbaugh organized the great¬
est lesson in health ever seen, but he had also, by his courage
and his power to command, saved hundreds of people from
being crushed, which latter was probably the only completely
accurate thing that has been said about Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh
in ten thousand columns of newspaper publicity.

Whether to see the Fair, Pickerbaugh, the delightful ravages
of a disaster, or another fight between the anti ladies, half the
city struggled into the Tabernacle that evening, and when
Pickerbaugh took the platform for his closing lecture he was
greeted with frenzy. Next day, when he galloped into the last
week of his campaign, he was overlord of all the district.

His opponent was a snuffy little lawyer whose strength lay in
his training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor,
county judge. But the Democratic slogan, “Pickerbaugh the
Pick-up Candidate,” was drowned in the admiration for the
hero of the health fair. He dashed about in motors, proclaim¬
ing, “I am not running because I want office, but because I
want the chance to take to the whole nation my ideals of
health.” Everywhere was plastered:

For Congress
PICKERBAUGH
The two-fisted fighting poet doc

Just elect him for a term
And all through the nation he’ll swat the germ.

Enormous meetings were held. Pickerbaugh was ample and
vague about his Policies. Yes, he was opposed to our entering
the European War, but he assured them, he certainly did as¬
sure them, that he was for using every power of our Govern¬
ment to end this terrible calamity. Yes, he was for high tariff,
but it must be so adjusted that the farmers in his district could
buy everything cheaply. Yes, he was for high wages for each
and every workman, but he stood like a rock, like a boulder,
like a moraine, for protecting the prosperity of all manufac¬
turers, merchants, and real-estate owners.

While this larger campaign thundered, there was proceeding
in Nautilus a smaller and much defter campaign, to reelect as

ARROWS M ITH

253

mayor one Mr. Pugh, Pickerbaugh’s loving chief. Mr. Pugh
sat nicely at desks, and he was pleasant and promissory to
everybody who came to see him; clergymen, gamblers, G. A. R.
veterans, circus advance-agents, policemen, and ladies of rea¬
sonable virtue — everybody except perhaps socialist agitators,
against whom he staunchly protected the embattled city. In
his speeches Pickerbaugh commended Pugh for “that firm
integrity and ready sympathy with which His Honor had
backed up every movement for the public weal,” and when
Pickerbaugh (quite honestly) begged, “Mr. Mayor, if I go to
Congress you must appoint Arrowsmith in my place; he knows
nothing about politics but he’s incorruptible,” then Pugh gave
his promise, and amity abode in that land. . . . Nobody said
anything at all about Mr. F. X. Jordan.

F. X. Jordan was a contractor with a generous interest in
politics. Pickerbaugh called him a grafter, and the last time
Pugh had been elected — it had been on a Reform Platform,
though since that time the reform had been coaxed to behave
itself and be practical — both Pugh and Pickerbaugh had de¬
nounced Jordan as a “malign force.” But so kindly was Mayor
Pugh that in the present election he said nothing that could
hurt Mr. Jordan’s feelings, and in return what could Mr. Jor¬
dan do but speak forgivingly about Mr. Pugh to the people in
blind-pigs and houses of ill fame?

On the evening of the election, Martin and Leora were
among the company awaiting the returns at the Pickerbaughs’.
They were confident. Martin had never been roused by poli¬
tics, but he was stirred now by Pickerbaugh’s twitchy pre¬
tense of indifference, by the telephoned report from the news¬
paper office, “Here’s Willow Grove township — Pickerbaugh
leading, two to one!” by the crowds which went past the
house howling, “Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh!”

At eleven the victory was certain, and Martin, his bowels
weak with unconfidence, realized that he was now Director
of Public Health, with responsibility for seventy thousand
lives.

He looked wistfully toward Leora and in her still smile found
assurance.

Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening,
and dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she
drew him into the back parlor and “So I’m going off to Wash¬
ington — and you don’t care a bit!” she said, her eyes blurred

254

ARROWSMITH

and languorous and undefended. He held her, muttering, “You
darling child, I can’t let you go!” As he walked home he
thought less of being Director than of Orchid’s eyes.

In the morning he groaned, “Doesn’t anybody ever learn
anything? Must I watch myself and still be a fool, all my
life? Doesn’t any story ever end?”

He never saw her afterward, except on the platform of the
train.

Leora surprisingly reflected, after the Pickerbaughs had
gone, “Sandy dear, I know how you feel about losing your
Orchid. It’s sort of Youth going. She really is a peach. Hon¬
estly, I can appreciate how you feel, and sympathize with
you — I mean, of course, providin’ you aren’t ever going to see
her again.”

Over the Nautilus Cornfield’s announcement was the vigor¬
ous headline:

ALMUS PICKERBAUGH WINS
First Scientist Ever Elected
to Congress

Side-kick of Darwin and Pasteur
Gives New Punch to Steering
Ship of State

Pickerbaugh’s resignation was to take effect at once; he
was, he explained, going to Washington before his term began,
to study legislative methods and start his propaganda for the
creation of a national Secretaryship of Health. There was a
considerable struggle over the appointment of Martin in his
stead. Klopchuk the dairyman was bitter; Irving Watters
whispered to fellow doctors that Martin was likely to extend
the socialistic free clinics; F. X. Jordan had a sensible young
doctor as his own candidate. It was the Ashford Grove Group,
Tredgold, Schlemihl, Monte Mugford, who brought it off.

Martin went to Tredgold worrying, “Do the people want
me? Shall I fight Jordan or get out?”

Tredgold said balmily, “Fight? What about? I own a
good share of the bank that’s lent various handy little sums to
Mayor Pugh. You leave it to me.”

Next day Martin was appointed, but only as Acting Direc-

ARROW SMITH

255

tor, with a salary of thirty-five hundred instead of four thou¬
sand.

That he had been put in by what he would have called
“crooked politics” did not occur to him.

Mayor Pugh called him in and chuckled:

“Doc, there’s been a certain amount of opposition to you,
because you’re pretty young and not many folks know you.
I haven’t any doubt I can give you the full appointment later —
if we find you’re competent and popular. Meantime you bet¬
ter avoid doing anything brash. Just come and ask my advice.
I know this town and the people that count better than you
do.”

The day of Pickerbaugh’s leaving for Washington was made
a fiesta. At the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of
Commerce gave to everybody who came a lunch of hot wienies,
doughnuts, and coffee, with chewing gum for the women and,
for the men, Schweinhugel’s Little Dandy Nautilus-made Che¬
roots.

The train left at three-fifty-five. The station was, to the
astonishment of innocent passengers gaping from the train win¬
dows, jammed with thousands.

By the rear platform, on a perilous packing box, Mayor
Pugh held forth. The Nautilus Silver Cornet Band played
three patriotic selections, then Pickerbaugh stood on the plat¬
form, his family about him. As he looked on the crowd, tears
were in his eyes.

“For once,” he stammered, “I guess I can’t make a speech.
D-darn it, I’m all choked up! I meant to orate a lot, but all
I can say is — I love you all, I’m mighty grateful, I’ll represent
you my level best, neighbors! God bless you!”

The train moved out, Pickerbaugh waving as long as he
could see them.

And Martin to Leora, “Oh, he’s a fine old boy. He — No,
I’m hanged if he is! The world’s always letting people get
away with asininities because they’re kind-hearted. And here
I’ve sat back like a coward, not saying a word, and watched
’em loose that wind-storm on the whole country. Oh, curse
it, isn’t anything in the world simple? Well, let’s go to the
office, and I’ll begin to do things conscientiously and all
wrong.”

CHAPTER XXIV

It cannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for
organization, but under him the Department of Public Health
changed completely. He chose as his assistant Dr. Rufus Ock-
ford, a lively youngster recommended by Dean Silva of Winne-
mac. The routine work, examination of babies, quarantines,
anti-tuberculosis placarding, went on as before.

Inspection of plumbing and food was perhaps more thor¬
ough, because Martin lacked Pickerbaugh’s buoyant faith in
the lay inspectors, and one of them he replaced, to the con¬
siderable displeasure of the colony of Germans in the Home-
dale district. Also he gave thought to the killing of rats and
fleas, and he regarded the vital statistics as something more
than a recording of births and deaths. He had notions about
their value which were most amusing to the health depart¬
ment clerk. He wanted a record of the effect of race, occupa¬
tion, and a dozen other factors upon the disease rate.

The chief difference was that Martin and Rufus Ockford
found themselves with plenty of leisure. Martin estimated
that Pickerbaugh must have used half his time in being in¬
spirational and eloquent.

He made his first mistake in assigning Ockford to spend part
of the week in the free city clinic, in addition to the two half¬
time physicians. There was fury in the Evangeline County
Medical^ Society. At a restaurant, Irving Watters came over
to Martin’s table.

“I hear you’ve increased the clinic staff,” said Dr. Watters.

“Yuh.”

“Thinking of increasing it still more?”

“Might be a good idea.”

“Now you see here, Mart. As you know, Mrs. Watters and
I have done everything in our power to make you and Leora
welcome. Glad to do anything I can for a fellow alumnus of
old Winnemac. But at the same time, there are limits, you
know! Not that I’ve got any objection to your providing

256

ARROWSMITH

257

free clinical facilities. Don’t know but what it’s a good thing
to treat the damn’, lazy, lousy pauper-class free, and keep the
D.B.’s off the books of the regular physicians. But same time,
when you begin to make a practise of encouraging a lot of
folks, that can afford to pay, to go and get free treatment, and
practically you attack the integrity of the physicians of this
city, that have been giving God knows how much of their
time to charity — ”

Martin answered neither wisely nor competently: “Irve,
sweetheart, you can go straight to hell 1 ”

After that hour, when they met there was nothing said be¬
tween them.

Without disturbing his routine work, he found himself able
to sink blissfully into the laboratory. At first he merely tin¬
kered, but suddenly he was in full cry, oblivious of every¬
thing save his experiment.

He was playing with cultures isolated from various dairies
and various people, thinking mostly of Klopchuk and strep¬
tococcus. Accidentally he discovered the lavish production of
hemolysin in sheep’s blood as compared with the blood of other
animals. Why should streptococcus dissolve the red blood cor¬
puscles of sheep more easily than those of rabbits?

It is true that a busy health-department bacteriologist has
no right to waste the public time in being curious, but the ir¬
responsible sniffing beagle in Martin drove out the faithful
routineer.

He neglected the examination of an ominously increasing
number of tubercular sputums; he set out to answer the ques¬
tion of the hemolysin. He wanted the streptococcus to pro¬
duce its blood-destroying poison in twenty-four-hour cultures.

He beautifully and excitedly failed, and sat for hours medi¬
tating. He tried a six-hour culture. He mixed the super¬
natant fluid from a centrifugated culture with a suspension of
red blood corpuscles and placed it in the incubator. When
he returned, two hours after, the blood cells were dissolved.

He telephoned to Leora: “Lee! Got something! C’n you
pack up sandwich and come down here f’r evening?”

“Sure,” said Leora.

When she appeared he explained to her that his discovery
was accidental, that most scientific discoveries were accidental,
and that no investigator, however great, could do anything more
than see the value of his chance results.

ARROWSMITH

258

He sounded mature and rather angry.

Leora sat in the corner, scratching her chin, reading a medi¬
cal journal. From time to time she reheated coffee, over a
doubtful Bunsen flame. When the office staff arrived in the
morning they found something that had but rarely occurred
during the regime of Almus Pickerbaugh: the Director of the
Department was transplanting cultures, and on a long table
was his wife, asleep.

Martin blared at Dr. Ockford, “Get t’ hell out of this,
Rufus, and take charge of the department for to-day — I’m out
- — I’m dead — and oh, say, get Leora home and fry her a couple
o’ eggs, and you might bring me a Denver sandwich from the
Sunset Trail Lunch, will you?”

“You bet, chief,” said Ockford.

Martin repeated his experiment, testing the cultures for
hemolysin after two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, six¬
teen, and eighteen horns of incubation. He discovered that the
maximum production of hemolysin occurred between four and
ten hours. He began to work out the formula of production —
and he was desolate. He fumed, raged, sweated. He found
that his mathematics was childish, and all his science rusty.
He pottered with chemistry, he ached over his mathematics,
and slowly he began to assemble his results. He believed that
he might have a paper for the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Now Almus Pickerbaugh had published scientific papers —
often. He had published them in the Midwest Medical Quar¬
terly, of which he was one of fourteen editors. He had dis¬
covered the germ of epilepsy and the germ of cancer — two en¬
tirely different germs of cancer. Usually it took him a fort¬
night to make the discovery, write the report, and have it ac¬
cepted. Martin lacked this admirable facility.

He experimented, he re-experimented, he cursed, he kept
Leora out of bed, he taught her to make media^ and was ill-
pleased by her opinions on agar. He was violent to the stenog¬
rapher; not once could the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards
Congregational Church get him to address the Bible Class;
and still for months his paper was not complete.

The first to protest was His Honor the Mayor. Returning
from an extremely agreeable game of chemin de fer with F. X.
Jordan, taking a short cut through the alley behind the City
Hall, Mayor Pugh saw Martin at two in the morning drearily
putting test-tubes into the incubator, while Leora sat in a cor-

ARRO WSMITH

259

ner smoking. Next day he summoned Martin, and protested:

“Doc, I don’t want to butt in on your department — my spe¬
cialty is never butting in — but it certainly strikes me that after
being trained by a seventy-horse-power booster like Picker-
baugh, you ought to know that it’s all damn’ foolishness to
spend so much time in the laboratory, when you can hire an
Ai laboratory fellow for thirty bucks a week. What you ought
to be doing is jollying along these sobs that are always panning
the administration. Get out and talk to the churches and
clubs, and help me put across the ideas that we stand for.”

“Maybe he’s right,” Martin considered. “I’m a rotten bac¬
teriologist. Probably I never will get this experiment to¬
gether. My job here is to keep tobacco-chewers from spitting.
Have I the right to waste the tax-payers’ money on anything
else?”

But that week he read, as an announcement issued by the
McGurk Institute of Biology of New York, that Dr. Max
Gottlieb had synthesized antibodies in -vitro .

He pictured the saturnine Gottlieb not at all enjoying the
triumph but, with locked door, abusing the papers for their ex¬
aggerative reports of his work; and as the picture became
sharp Martin was like a subaltern stationed in a desert isle
when he learns that his old regiment is going off to an agree¬
able Border war.

Then the McCandless fury broke.

Mrs. McCandless had once been a “hired girl”; then nurse,
then confidante, then wife to the invalid Mr. McCandless,
wholesale grocer and owner of real estate. When he died she
inherited everything. There was a suit, of course, but she had
an excellent lawyer.

She was a grim, graceless, shady, mean woman, yet a nym¬
phomaniac. She was not invited into Nautilus society, but in
her unaired parlor, on the mildewed couch, she entertained
seedy, belching, oldish married men, a young policeman
to whom she often lent money, and the contractor-politician,
F. X. Jordan.

She owned, in Swede Hollow, the filthiest block of tenements
in Nautilus. Martin had made a tuberculosis map of these
tenements, and in conferences with Dr. Ockford and Leora he

26o ARROWSMITH

denounced them as murder-holes. He wanted to destroy them,
but the police power of the Director of Public Health was
vague. Pickerbaugh had enjoyed the possession of large power
only because he never used it.

Martin sought a court decision for the demolition oi tne
McCandless tenements. Her lawyer was also the lawyer of
F X. Jordan, and the most eloquent witness against Martin
was Dr. Irving Watters. But it chanced, because of the ab¬
sence of the proper judge, that the case came before an igno¬
rant and honest person who quashed the injunction secured by
Mrs. McCandless’s lawyer and instructed the Department of
Public Health that it might use such methods as the city ordi¬
nances provided for emergencies.

That evening Martin grumbled to young Ockford, You
don’t suppose for a moment, do you, Rufus, that McCandless
and Jordan won’t appeal the case? Let’s get rid of the tene¬
ments while it’s comparatively legal, heh?”

“You bet, chief,” said Ockford, and, “Say, let’s go out to
Oregon and start practise when we get kicked out. Well, we
can depend on our sanitary inspector, anyway. Jordan seduced
his sister, here ’bout six years back.”

At dawn a gang headed by Martin and Ockford, in blue
overalls, joyful and rowdyish, invaded the McCandless tene¬
ments, drove the tenants into the street, and began to tear
down the flimsy buildings. At noon, when lawyers appeared
and the tenants were in new flats commandeered by Martin,
the wreckers set fire to the lower stories, and in half an hour
the buildings had been annihilated.

F. X. Jordan came to the scene after lunch. A filthy Martin
and a dusty Ockford were drinking coffee brought by Leora.

“Well, boys,” said Jordan, “you’ve put it all over us. Only
if you ever pull this kind of stunt again, use dynamite and
save a lot of time. You know, I like you boys — I’m sorry
for what I’ve got to do to you. But may the saints help you,
because it’s just a question of time when I learn you not to
monkey with the buzz-saw.”

Clay Tredgold admired their amateur arson and rejoiced,
“Fine! I’m going to back you up in everything the D. P. H.
does.”

ARROWS MITH

261

Martin was not too pleased by the promise, for Tredgold’s
set were somewhat exigent. They had decided that Martin
and Leora were free spirits like themselves, and amusing, but
they had also decided, long before the Arrowsmiths had by
coming to Nautilus entered into authentic existence, that the
Group had a monopoly of all Freedom and Amusingness, and
they expected the Arrowsmiths to appear for cocktails and
poker every Saturday and Sunday evening. They could not
understand why Martin should desire to spend his time in a
laboratory, drudging over something called “streptolysin,”
which had nothing to do with cocktails, motors, steel wind¬
mills, or insurance.

On an evening perhaps a fortnight after the destruction of
the McCandless tenements, Martin was working late in the
laboratory. He wasn’t even doing experiments which might
have diverted the Group — causing bacterial colonies to cloud
liquids, or making things change color. He was merely sitting
at a table, looking at logarithmic tables. Leora was not there,
and he was mumbling, “Confound her, why did she have to go
and be sick to-day?”

Tredgold and Schlemihl and their wives were bound for the
Old Farmhouse Inn. They had telephoned to Martin’s flat and
learned where he was. From the alley behind City Hall they
could peer in and see him, dreary and deserted.

“We’ll take the old boy out and brighten him up.. First,
let’s rush home and shake up a few cocktails and bring ’em
down to surprise him,” was Tredgold’s inspiration.

Tredgold came into the laboratory, a half-hour later, with
much clamor.

“This is a nice way to put in a moonlit spring evening,
young Narrowsmith! Come on, we’ll all go out and dance a
little. Grab your hat.”

“Gosh, Clay, I’d like to, but honestly I can’t. I’ve got to
work; simply got to.”

“Rats! Don’t be silly. You’ve been working too hard.
Here— look what Father’s brought. Be reasonable. Get out¬
side of a nice long cocktail and you’ll have a new light on
things.”

Martin was reasonable up to that point, but he did not have
a new light. Tredgold would not take No. Martin continued
to refuse, affectionately, then a bit tartly. Outside, Schlemihl
pressed down the button of the motor horn and held it, pro-

262

ARROWSMITH

ducing a demanding, infuriating yawp which made Martin
cry, “For God’s sake go out and make ’em quit that, will you,
and let me alone! I’ve got to work, I told you!”

Tredgold stared a moment. “I certainly shall! I’m not ac¬
customed to force my attentions on people. Pardon me for
disturbing you!”

By the time Martin sulkily felt that he must apologize, the
car was gone. Next day and all the week, he waited for Tred¬
gold to telephone, and Tredgold waited for him to telephone,
and they fell into a circle of dislike. Leora and Clara Tred¬
gold saw each other once or twice, but they were uncomfort¬
able, and a fortnight later, when the most prominent physician
in town dined with the Tredgolds and attacked Martin as a
bumptious and narrow-visioned young man, both the Tred¬
golds listened and agreed.

Opposition to Martin developed all at once.

Various physicians were against him, not only because of
the enlarged clinics, but because he rarely asked their help and
never their advice. Mayor Pugh considered him tactless.
Klopchuk and F. X. Jordan were assailing him as crooked.
The reporters disliked him for his secrecy and occasional
bruskness. And the Group had ceased to defend him. Of
all these forces Martin was more or less aware, and behind
them he fancied that doubtful business men, sellers of impure
ice-cream and milk, owners of unsanitary shops and dirty
tenements, men who had always hated Pickerbaugh but who
had feared to attack him because of his popularity, were gath¬
ering to destroy the entire Department of Public Health. . . .
He appreciated Pickerbaugh in those days, and loved soldier-
wise the Department.

There came from Mayor Pugh a hint that he would save
trouble by resigning. He would not resign. Neither would he
go to the citizens begging for support. He did his work, and
leaned on Leora’s assurance, and tried to ignore his detractors.
He could not.

News-items and three-line editorial squibs dug at his ty¬
ranny, his ignorance, his callowness. An old woman died after
treatment at the clinic, and the coroner hinted that it had been
the fault of “our almighty health-officer’s pet cub assistant.”
Somewhere arose the name “the Schoolboy Czar” for Martin,
and it stuck.

In the gossip at luncheon clubs, in discussions at the Par-

ARROWSMITH

263

ents’ and Teachers’ Association, in one frank signed protest
sent to the Mayor, Martin was blamed for too strict an inspec¬
tion of milk, for insufficiently strict inspection of milk; for
permitting garbage to lie untouched, for persecuting the over¬
worked garbage collectors; and when a case of small-pox ap¬
peared in the Bohemian section, there was an opinion that
Martin had gone out personally and started it.

However vague the citizens were as to the nature of his
wickedness, once they lost faith in him they lost it completely
and with joy, and they welcomed an apparently spontaneously
generated rumor that he had betrayed his benefactor, their be¬
loved Dr. Pickerbaugh, by seducing Orchid.

At this interesting touch of immorality, he had all the fash¬
ionable churches against him. The pastor of the Jonathan Ed¬
wards Church touched up a sermon about Sin in High Places
by a reference to “one who, while like a Czar he pretends to
be safeguarding the city from entirely imaginary dangers, yet
winks at the secret vice rampant in hidden places; who allies
himself with the forces of graft and evil and the thugs who
batten on honest but deluded Labor; one who cannot arise, a
manly man among men, and say, ‘I have a clean heart and
clean hands.’ ”

It is true that some of the delighted congregation thought
that this referred to Mayor Pugh, and others applied it to
F. X. Jordan, but wise citizens saw that it was a courageous
attack on that monster of treacherous lewdness, Dr. Arrow-
smith.

In all the city there were exactly two ministers who defended
him: Father Costello of the Irish Catholic Church, and Rabbi
Rovine. They were, it happened, very good friends, and not
at all friendly with the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards
Church. They bullied their congregations; each of them as¬
serted, “People come sneaking around with criticisms of our
new Director of Health. If you want to make charges, make
them openly. I will not listen to cowardly hints. And let me
tell you that this city is lucky in having for health-officer a
man who is honest and who actually knows something!”

But their congregations were poor.

Martin realized that he was lost. He tried to analyze his un¬

popularity. , , . ,

“It isn’t just Jordan’s plotting and Tredgolds grousing and
Pugh’s weak spine. It’s my own fault. I can’t go out and

264 ARROWSMITH

soft-soap the people and get their permission to help keep
them well. And I won’t tell them what a hell of an important
thing my work is — that I’m the one thing that saves the whole
lot of ’em from dying immediately. Apparently an official in a
democratic state has to do those things. Well, I don’t! But
I’ve got to think up something or they’ll emasculate the whole
Department.”

One inspiration he did have. If Pickerbaugh were here, he
could crush, or lovingly smother, the opposition. He remem¬
bered Pickerbaugh’s farewell: “Now, my boy, even if I’m
way off there in Washington, this Work will be as close to rny
heart as it ever was, and if you should really need me, you just
send for me and I’ll drop everything and come.”

Martin wrote hinting that he was very much needed.

Pickerbaugh replied by return mail — good old Pickerbaugh!
— but the reply was, “I cannot tell you how grieved I am that
I cannot for the moment possibly get away from Washington
but am sure that in your earnestness you exaggerate strength of
opposition, write me freely, at any time.”

“That’s my last shot,” Martin said to Leora. “I’m done.
Mayor Pugh will fire me, just as soon as he comes back from
his fishing trip. I’m a failure again, darling.”

“You’re not a failure, and you must eat some of this nice
steak, and what shall we do now— time for us to be moving
on, anyway — I hate staying in one place,” said Leora.

“I don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe I could get a job at
Hunziker’s. Or go back to Dakota and try to work up a
practise. What I’d like is to become a farmer and get me a big
shot-gun and drive every earnest Christian citizen off the place.
But meantime I’m going to stick here. I might win yet — with
just a couple of miracles and a divine intervention. Oh, God, I
am so tired! Are you coming back to the lab with me this
evening? Honest, I’ll quit early— before eleven, maybe.”

He had completed his paper on the streptolysin research,
and he took a day off to go to Chicago and talk it over with
an editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases. As he left
Nautilus he was confused. He had caught himself rejoicing
that he was free of Wheatsylvania and bound for great Nau¬
tilus. Time bent back, progress was annihilated, and he was
mazed with futility.

The editor praised his paper, accepted it, and suggested only
one change. Martin had to wait for his train. He remembered

ARROWSMITH

265

that Angus Duer was in Chicago, with the Rouncefield Clinic —
a private organization of medical specialists, sharing costs and
profits.

The clinic occupied fourteen rooms in a twenty-story build¬
ing constructed (or so Martin certainly remembered it) of
marble, gold, and rubies. The clinic reception-room, focused
on a vast stone fireplace, was like the drawing-room of an oil
magnate, but it was not a place of leisure. The young woman
at the door demanded Martin’s symptoms and address. A page
in buttons sped with his name to a nurse, who flew to the inner
offices. Before Angus appeared, Martin had to wait a quarter-
hour in a smaller, richer, still more abashing reception-room.
Bu this time he was so awed that he would have permitted the
clinic surgeons to operate on him for any ill which at the mo¬
ment they happened to fancy.

In medical school and Zenith General Hospital, Angus Duer
had been efficient enough, but now he was ten times as self-
assured. He was cordial; he invited Martin to step out for a
dish of tea as though he almost meant it; but beside him
Martin felt young, rustic, inept.

Angus won him by pondering, “Irving Watters? He was
Digam? I’m not sure I remember him. Oh, yes — he was
one of these boneheads that are the curse of every profession.”

When Martin had sketched his conflict at Nautilus, Angus
suggested, “You better come join us here at Rouncefield, as
pathologist. Our pathologist is leaving in a few weeks. You
could do the job, all right. You’re getting thirty-five hundred
a year now? Well, I think I could get you forty-five hundred,
as a starter, and some day you’d become a regular member of
the clinic and get in on all the profits. Let me know if you
want it. Rouncefield told me to dig up a man.”

With this resource and with an affection for Angus, Martin
returned to Nautilus and open war. When Mayor Pugh re¬
turned he did not discharge Martin, but he appointed over him,
as full Director, Pickerbaugh’s friend, Dr. Bissex, the football
coach and health director of Mugford College.

Dr. Bissex first discharged Rufus Ockford, which took five
minutes, went out and addressed a Y. M. C. A. meeting, then
bustled in and invited Martin to resign.

“I will like hell!” said Martin. “Come on, be honest, Bis¬
sex. If you want to fire me, do it, but let’s have things
straight. I won’t resign, and if you do fire me I think I’ll take

266

ARRO WSMITH

it to the courts, and maybe I can turn enough light on you
and His Honor and Frank Jordan to keep you from taking
all the guts out of the work here.”

“Why, Doctor, what a way to talk! Certainly I won’t fire
you,” said Bissex, in the manner of one who has talked to
difficult students and to lazy football teams. “Stay with us
as long as you like. Only, in the interests of economy, I reduce
your salary to eight hundred dollars a year!”

“All right, reduce and be damned,” said Martin.

It sounded particularly fine and original when he said it,
but less so when Leora and he found that, with their rent fixed
by their lease, they could not by whatever mean economies
live on less than a thousand a year.

Now that he was free from responsibility he began to form
his'own faction, to save the Department. He gathered Rabbi
RoVine, Father Costello, Ockford, who was going to remain
in town and practise, the secretary of the Labor Council, a
banker who regarded Tredgold as “fast,” and that excellent
fellow the dentist of the school clinic.

“With people like that behind me, I can do something,” he
gloated to Leora. “I’m going to stick by it. I’m not going
to have the D. P. H. turned into a Y. M. C. A. Bissex has all
of Pickerbaugh’s mush without his honesty and vigor. I can
beat him! I’m not much of an executive, but I was beginning
to visualize a D. P. H. that would be solid and not gaseous —
that would save kids and prevent epidemics. I won’t give it
up. You watch me!”

His committee made representations to the Commercial Club,
and for a time they were certain that the chief reporter of the
Frontiersman was going to support them, “as soon as he could
get his editor over being scared of a row.” But Martin’s bel¬
ligerency was weakened by shame, for he never had enough
money to meet his bills, and he was not used to dodging irate
grocers, receiving dunning letters, standing at the door argu¬
ing with impertinent bill-collectors. He, who had been a city
dignitary a few days before, had to endure, “Come on
now, you pay up, you dead beat, or I’ll get a cop!” When the
shame had grown to terror, Dr. Bissex suddenly reduced his
salary another two hundred dollars.

Martin stormed into the mayor’s office to have it out, and
found F. X. Jordan sitting with Pugh. It was evident that

ARROWSMITH 267

they both knew of the second reduction and considered it an
excellent joke.

He reassembled his committee. “I’m going to take this into
the courts,” he raged.

“Fine,” said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: “Jenkins,
that radical lawyer, would handle the case free.”

The wise banker observed, “You haven’t got anything to take
into the courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex
has a legal right to reduce your salary all he wants to. The
city regulations don’t fix the salary for anybody except the
Director and the inspectors. You haven’t a thing to say.”

With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, “And I
suppose I haven’t a thing to say if they wreck the Depart¬
ment! ”

“Not a thing, if the city doesn’t care.”

“Well, I care! I’ll starve before I’ll resign!”

“You’ll starve if you don’t resign, and your wife, too. Now
here’s my plan,” said the banker. “You go into private prac¬
tise here — I’ll finance your getting an office and so on — and
when the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we’ll
all get together again and have you put in as full Director.”

“Ten years of waiting — in Nautilus? Nope. I’m licked.
I’m a complete failure — at thirty-two! I’ll resign. I’ll wan¬
der on,” said Martin.

“I know I’m going to love Chicago,” said Leora.

He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in
the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, “they could not at
the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred
a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hun¬
dred.”

Martin accepted.

When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had re¬
signed, the good citizens chuckled, “Resigned? He got kicked
out, that’s what happened.” One of the papers had an inno¬
cent squib:

268 ARROWSMITH

Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful
human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint
while indulging in every vice, and tries to coyer up his gross igno¬
rance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a no y
show of himself by not even doing a first-class job of wire-pulling,
then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins to holler tor tne
meat-ax.

Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:

I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I can¬
not tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in
breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex
informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to reduce
your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather work for
the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night
watchman than give up the fight for everything that is decent and
constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your
defection, your going back to private practise, merely for commer¬
cial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high emolu¬
ment, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had to
sustain.

As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:

“I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to
see a laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done
with everything but making money.

“I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but
a gilded boob-trap — scare the poor millionaire into having
all the fancy kinds of examinations and treatments the traffic
will bear. I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group
doctor the rest of my life. I hope I have the sense to be!

“All wise men are bandits. They’re loyal to their friends,
but they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of
people despise them if they aren’t bandits? Angus Duer had
the sense to see this from the beginning, way back in medic
school. He’s probably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he
knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it’s
taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!

“Know what I’ll do? I’ll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic
till I’m making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I’ll
get Ockford and start my own clinic, with myself as internist
and head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent
I can.

ARROWSMITH 269

“All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot
of tapestry, they shall have it — and pay for it.

“I never thought I could be such a failure — to become a
commercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don’t
want to be anything else, believe me! I’m through!”

CHAPTER XXV

Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night,
yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or
eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that most com¬
petent, most clean and brisk and visionless medical factory, the
Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of which to complain.
The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many roentgenological ex¬
aminations to socially dislocated women who needed children
and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they
did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but
certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more
gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw
human material through so many processes so swiftly. The
Martin Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Picker-
baughs and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus
Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the clinic only the
respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.

He admired Angus’s firmness of purpose and stability of
habit.

Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily
and fenced like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before
eleven-thirty; he never took more than one drink a day; and
he never read anything or said anything which would not con¬
tribute to his progress as a Brilliant Young Surgeon. His un¬
derlings knew that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive precisely
on time, precisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool, and
appallingly unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or
looked for a smile.

Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and
ardent tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to
Angus for abdominal surgery or to Rouncefield for any opera¬
tion of the head or neck, providing he was himself quite
sure the operation was necessary, but he was never able to
rise to the clinic’s lyric faith that any portions of the body

270

ARRO WSMITH

271

without which people could conceivably get along should cer¬
tainly be removed at once.

The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all
his working day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-
tenth of his brain, he made blood counts, did urinalyses and
Wassermanns and infrequent necropsies, and all the while he
was dead, in a white-tiled coffin. Amid the blattings of
Pickerbaugh and the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had lived,
had fought his environment. Now there was nothing to fight.

After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the
world of book-shops and print-shops and theaters and concerts.
They read novels and history and travel; they talked, at din¬
ners given by Rouncefield or Angus, to journalists, engineers,
bankers, merchants. They saw a Russian play, and heard
Mischa Elman, and read Gottlieb’s beloved Rabelais. Martin
learned to flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the
first time to a hair-dresser and to a manicure, and began her
lessons in French. She had called Martin a “lie-hunter,” a
“truth-seeker.” They decided now, talking it over in their
tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who
called themselves “truth-seekers” — persons who scurry about
chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible separable thing,
like houses or salt or bread — did not so much desire to find
Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-
seekers quested the “secret of life” in laboratories which did
not seem to be provided with Bunsen flames or reagents ; or they
went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and
undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from
unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying
things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice
and gazing on one’s navel.

To these high matters Martin responded, “Rot!” He insisted
that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not
a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by
its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that
no one could expect more than, by stubbornness or luck, to
have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become
better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average
job-holder.

His mechanistic philosophy did not persuade him that he
was progressing adequately. When he tried to match himself
with the experts of the clinic or with their professional friends,

272 ARROWSMITH

he was even more uncomfortable than he had been under the
disconcerting scorn of Dr. Hesselink of Groningen. At clinic
luncheons he met surgeons from London, New York, Boston;
men with limousines and social positions and the offensive
briskness of the man who has numerous engagements, or the
yet more offensive quietness of the person who is amused by
his inferiors; master technicians, readers of papers at medical
congresses, executives and controllers, unafraid to operate be¬
fore a hundred peering doctors, or to give well-bred and ex¬
ceedingly final orders to subordinates; captain-generals of
medicine, never doubting themselves; great priests and healers,
men mature and wise and careful and blandly cordial.

In their winged presences, Max Gottlieb seemed an aged
fusser, Gustaf Sondelius a mountebank, and the city of Nauti¬
lus unworthy of passionate warfare. As their suave courtesy
smothered him, Martin felt like a footman.

In long hours of increasing frankness and lucidity he dis¬
cussed with Leora the question of “What is this Martin Arrow-
smith and whither is he going?” and he admitted that the sight
of the Famous Surgeons disturbed his ancient faith that he
was somehow a superior person. It was Leora who consoled
him:

“I’ve got a lovely description for your dratted Famous
Surgeons. You know how polite and important they are, and
they smile so carefully? Well, don’t you remember you once
said that Professor Gottlieb called all such people like that
‘men of measured merriment’?”

He caught up the phrase; they sang it together; and they
made of it a beating impish song:

“Men of measured merriment! Men of measured merriment!
Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment,
damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the
shops, oh, damn their measured merriment, the men with
measured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment, and
DAMN their careful smiles!”

While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of
Wheatsylvania to mature man, his relations to Leora developed
from loyal boy-and-girl adventurousness to lasting solidity.
They had that understanding of each other known only to

ARRO WSMITH

273

married people, a few married people, wherein for all their dif¬
ferences they were as much indissoluble parts of a whole as
are the eye and hand. Their identification did not mean
that they dwelt always in rosy bliss. Because he was so inti¬
mately fond of her and so sure of her, because anger and eager
hot injustices are but ways of expressing trust, Martin was
irritated by her and querulous with her as he would not have
endured being with any other woman, any charming Orchid.

He stalked out now and then after a quarrel, disdaining to
answer her, and for hours he left her alone, enjoying the
knowledge that he was hurting her, that she was alone, wait¬
ing, perhaps weeping. Because he loved her and also was fond
of her, he was annoyed when she was less sleek, less suave,
than the women he encountered at Angus Duer’s.

Mrs. Rouncefield was a worthy old waddler — beside her,
Leora was shining and exquisite. But Mrs. Duer was of amber
and ice. She was a rich young woman, she dressed with dis¬
tinction, she spoke with finishing-school mock-melodiousness,
she was ambitious, and she was untroubled by the possession of
a heart or a brain. She was, indeed, what Mrs. Irving Watters
believed herself to be.

In the simple gorgeousness of the Nautilus Smart set, Mrs.
Clay Tredgold had petted Leora and laughed at her if she
lacked a shoe-buckle or split an infinitive, but the gold-slippered
Mrs. Duer was accustomed to sneer at carelessness with the
most courteous and unresentable and unmistakable sneers.

As they returned by taxicab from the Duers’, Martin flared:

“Don’t you ever learn anything? I remember once in Nau¬
tilus we stopped on a country road and talked till — oh, darn’
near dawn, and you were going to be so energetic, but here we
are again to-night, with just the same thing — Good God,
couldn’t you even take the trouble to notice that you had a
spot of soot on your nose to-night? Mrs. Duer noticed it,
all right! Why are you so sloppy? Why can’t you take a lit¬
tle care? And why can’t you make an effort, anyway, to have
something to say? You just sit there at dinner — you just sit
and look healthy! Don’t you want to help me? Mrs. Duer
will probably help Angus to become president of the American
Medical Association, in about twenty years, and by that time
I suppose you’ll have me back in Dakota as assistant to Hes-
selink ! ”

Leora had been snuggling beside him in the unusual luxury

274 ARROWSMITH

of a taxicab. She sat straight now, and when she spoke she
had lost the casual independence with which she usually re¬
garded life:

“Dear, I’m awfully sorry. I went out this afternoon, I went
out and had a facial massage, so as to look nice for you, and
then I knew you like conversation, so I got my little book
about modern painting that I bought and I studied it terribly
hard, but to-night I just couldn’t seem to get the conversation
around to modern painting — ”

He was sobbing, with her head on his shoulder, “Oh, you
poor, scared, bullied kid, trying to be grown-up with these
dollar-chasers!”

After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at
the Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few
loose knots of his streptolysin research.

When Angus Duer discovered it he hinted, “Look here, Mar¬
tin, I’m glad you’re keeping on with your science, but if I
were you I wouldn’t, I think, waste too much energy on mere
curiosity. Dr. Rouncefield was speaking about it the other
day. We’d be glad to have you do all the research you want,
only we’d like it if you went at something practical. Take
for instance: if you could make a tabulation of the blood-
counts in a couple of hundred cases of appendicitis and pub¬
lish it, that’d get somewhere, and you could sort of bring in
a mention of the clinic, and we’d all receive a little credit —
and incidentally maybe we could raise you to three thousand
a year then.”

This generosity had the effect of extinguishing Martin’s de¬
sire to do any research whatever.

“Angus is right. What he means is: as a scientist I’m
finished. I am. I’ll never try to do anything original again.”

It was at this time, when Martin had been with the clinic
for a year, that his streptolysin paper was published in the
Journal of Infeotious Diseases. He gave reprints to Rounce¬
field and to Angus. They said extremely nice things which
showed that they had not read the paper, and again they sug¬
gested his tabulating blood-counts.

He also sent a reprint to Max Gottlieb, at the McGurk In¬
stitute of Biology.

ARROWSMITH

275

Gottlieb wrote to him, in that dead-black spider-web script;

Dear Martin :

I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the
relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are illuminating.
I have spoken about you to Tubbs. When are you coming to us- —
to me? Your laboratory and diener are waiting for you here. The
last thing I want to be is a mystic, but I feel when I see your fine
engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield that you should
be tired of trying to be a good citizen and ready to come back to
work. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can come.

Truly yours,

M. Gottlieb.

£Tm simply going to adore New York,” said Leora.

CHAPTER XXVI

The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of
glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New
York rules a quarter of the world. _

Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New. York,
after a year in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisureiy.
But when from the elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth
Tower, he was exalted. To him architecture had never existed ;
buildings were larger or smaller bulks containing more or less
interesting objects. His most impassioned architectural com¬
ment had been, “There’s a cute bungalow; be nice place to
live.” Now he pondered, “Like to see that tower every day-
clouds and storms behind it and everything— so sort of satis¬
fying.”

He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks
portly with wares from all the world; came to the bronze
doors of the McGurk Building and a corridor of intemperately
colored terra-cotta, with murals of Andean Indians, pirates
booming up the Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and the
stout walls of Cartagena. At the Cedar Street end of the
corridor, a private street, one block long, was the Bank of the
Andes and Antilles (Ross McGurk chairman of the board),
in whose gold-crusted sanctity red-headed Yankee exporters
drew drafts on Quito, and clerks hurled breathless Spanish at
bulky women. A sign indicated, at the Liberty Street end,
“Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly sailings for the West
Indies and South America.”

Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the corn¬
fields, Martin was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous
enterprises.

One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled “Ex¬
press to McGurk Institute.” He entered it proudly, feeling
himself already a part of the godly association. They rose
swiftly, and he had but half-second glimpses of ground glass

276

ARRO WSMITH

277

doors with the signs of mining companies, lumber companies,
Central American railroad companies.

The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for
scientific research in the world which is housed in an office
building. It has the twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the
McGurk Building, and the roof is devoted to its animal house
and to tiled walks along which (above a world of stenog¬
raphers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire to
sell Better-bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine)
saunter rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.

Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the
Institute was smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white
paneling and Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rounce-
field Clinic, but now he was unconscious of the room, of the
staccato girl attendant, of everything except that he was about
to see Max Gottlieb, for the first time in five years.

At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.

Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose
bony, his fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray,
the flesh round his mouth was sunken, and Martin could have
wept at the feebleness with which he rose. The old man
peered down at him, his hand on Martin’s shoulder, but he
said only:

“Ah! Dis is good. . . . Your laboratory is three doors down
the hall. . . . But I object to one thing in the good paper
you send me. You say, ‘The regularity of the rate at which
the streptolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be
found—”

“But it can, sir!”

“Then why did you not make the equation?”

“Well — I don’t know. I wasn’t enough of a mathemati¬
cian.”

“Then you should not have published till you knew your
math!”

“I — Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough
to work here? I want terribly to succeed.”

“Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh,
yes, it is a word that liddle schoolboys use at the University
of Winnemac. It means passing examinations. But there are
no examinations to pass here. . . . Martin, let us be clear.
You know something of laboratory technique; you have heard
about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and mathe-

278 ARROWSMITH

matics — pfui! — most terrible! But you have curiosity and
you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I
t’ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad
one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the
rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can gif
lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible
enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting.”

Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin
asserting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trad¬
ing and writing and get straightway into laboratories to ob¬
serve new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were
already too many facile scientists, that the one thing neces¬
sary was the mathematical analysis (and often the destruction)
of phenomena already observed.

It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful
with the certainty that he had come home.

The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the
floor, his long arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back;
Martin leaping on and off tall stools) was not in the least re¬
markable — a sink, a bench with racks of numbered test-tubes,
a microscope, a few note-books and hydrogen-ion charts, a
grotesque series of bottles connected by glass and rubber tubes
on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the room — yet now
and then during his tirades Martin looked about reverently.

Gottlieb interrupted their debate: “What work do you want
to do here?”

“Why, sir, I’d like to help you, if I can. I suppose you’re
cleaning up some things on the synthesis of antibodies.”

“Yes, I t’ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass
action law. But you are not to help me. You are to do your
own work. What do you want to do? This is not a clinic,
wit’ patients going through so neat in a row!”

“I want to find a hemolysin for which there’s an antibody.
There isn’t any for streptolysin. I’d like to work with staphy-
lolysin. Would you mind?”

“I do not care what you do — if you just do not steal my
staph cultures out of the ice-box, and if you will look mys¬
terious all the time, so Dr. Tubbs, our Director, will t’ink you
are up to something big. So! I haf only one suggestion:
when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine collection of
detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be serious —
this once, when you are just come?

ARROWS MITH

279

“Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate
me. There are plots against me — oh, you t’ink I imagine it,
but you shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I
keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.

“To be a scientist — it is not just a different job, so that a
man should choose between being a scientist and being an ex¬
plorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer.
It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or
wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from
the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care
much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and
make love. But the scientist is intensely religious — he is so
religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they
are an insult to his faith.

“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable
laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their
silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink
man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American
booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their
blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers
who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthro¬
pologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they
have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a
man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and
chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch
our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they
heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps;
and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles
who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists,
guess-scientists — like these psycho-analysts; and worse than
those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed
in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book
and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the
only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he
alone knows how liddle he knows.

“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet
dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heart¬
less — so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The
world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the
doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not un¬
derstand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their

28o

ARROWS MITH

country against, by the preachers that yearn to make every¬
body listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their
workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors —
and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the
world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works
and searches and never goes around howling how he loves
everybody!

“But once again always remember that not all the men who
work at science are scientists. So few! The rest — secretaries,
press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being
a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a
liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing —
no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as
you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to pro¬
tect you from Success. It is all I can do. So. ... I should
wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch
bless you!”

Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was
to be his — smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right
height, a proper sink with pedal taps. When he had closed
the door and let his spirit flow out and fill that minute apart¬
ment with his own essence, he felt secure.

No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag
him away to be explanatory and plausible and public ; he would
be free to work, instead of being summoned to the package¬
wrapping and dictation of breezy letters which men call work.

He looked out of the broad window above his bench and
saw that he did have the coveted Woolworth Tower, to keep
and gloat on. Shut in to a joy of precision, he would never¬
theless not be walled out from flowing life. He had, to the
north, not the Woolworth Tower alone but the Singer Build¬
ing, the arrogant magnificence of the City Investing Building.
To the west, tall ships were riding, tugs were bustling, all the
world went by. Below his cliff, the streets were feverish. Sud¬
denly he loved humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows
of test-tubes, and he prayed then the prayer of the scientist:

“God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God
give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and
all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.

ARROWSMITH

281

God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor
accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated re¬
sults or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God
give me strength not to trust to God!”

He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in
the Thirties, and all the way the crowds stared at him — this
slim, Dale, black-eyed, beaming young man who thrust among
them, half-running, seeing nothing yet in a blur seeing every¬
thing: gallant buildings, filthy streets, relentless traffic, sol¬
diers of fortune, fools, pretty women, frivolous shops, windy
sky. His feet raced to the tune of “I’ve found my work, I’ve
found my work, I’ve found my work!”

Leora was awaiting him — Leora whose fate it was ever to
wait for him in creaky rocking-chairs in cheapish rooms. As
he galloped in she smiled, and all her thin, sweet body was
illumined. Before he spoke she cried:

“Oh, Sandy, I’m so glad!”

She interrupted his room-striding panegyrics on Max Gott¬
lieb, on the McGurk Institute, on New York, on the charms
of staphylolysin, by a meek “Dear, how much are they going
to pay you?”

He stopped with a bump. “Gosh! I forgot to ask!”

“Oh!”

“Now you look here! This isn’t a Rouncefield Clinic! I
hate these buzzards that can’t see anything but making
money — ”

“I know, Sandy. Honestly, I don’t care. I was just won¬
dering what kind of a flat we’ll be able to afford, so I can
begin looking for it. Go on. Dr. Gottlieb said — ”

It was three hours after, at eight, when they went to dinner.

The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city
nor any sort of magic but merely a route: their flat, the sub¬
way, the Institute, a favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few
streets of laundries and delicatessens and movie theaters. But
to-night it was a fog of wonder. They dined at the Brevoort,
of which Gustaf Sondelius had told him. This was in 1916,

ARROWSMITH

282

before the country had become wholesome and sterile, and
the Brevoort was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis,
dangling neckties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Mar¬
nier, British Intelligence officers, brokers, conversation, and
Martell, V.O.

“It’s a fine crazy bunch,” said Martin. “Do you realize
we can stop being respectable now? Irving Watters isn’t
watching us, or Angus! Would we be too insane if we had a
bottle of champagne?”

He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick some¬
where, as there had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he
set to work he seemed to be in a perfect world. The Institute
deftly provided all the material and facilities he could desire —
animals, incubators, glassware, cultures, media — and he had a
thoroughly trained technician — “gargon” they called him at the
Institute. He really was let alone; he really was encouraged
to do individual work; he really was associated with men who
thought not in terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-
dollar operations but of colloids and sporulation and electrons,
and of the laws and energies which governed them.

On his first day there came to greet him the head of the
Department of Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred
in physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be
the head of a department: a tall, slim, easy man with a trim
mustache. Martin had been reared in the school of Clif
Clawson; he had not realized, till he heard Dr. Holabird’s quick
greeting, that a man’s voice may be charming without effemi¬
nacy.

Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute,
and Martin beheld all the wonders of which he had ever
dreamed. If it was not so large, McGurk ranked in equip¬
ment with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick, Lister. Martin
saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for glass-
blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a steel-
and-cement-walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum
of pathology and bacteriology to which he longed to add.
There was a department of publications, whence were issued
the Institute reports, and the American Journal of Geographic
Pathology, edited by the Director, Dr. Tubbs; there was a
room for photography, a glorious library, an aquarium for the

ARROWSMITH

283

Department of Marine Biology, and (Dr. Tubbs’s own idea) a
row of laboratories which visiting foreign scientists were in¬
vited to use as their own. A Belgian biologist and a Portu¬
guese bio-chemist were occupying guest laboratories now, and
once, Martin thrilled to learn, Gustaf Sondelius had been here.

Then Martin saw the Berkeley-Saunders centrifuge.

The principle of the centrifuge is that of the cream-separator.
It collects as sediment the solids scattered through a liquid,
such as bacteria in a solution. Most centrifuges are hand- or
water-power contrivances the size of a large cocktail-shaker,
but this noble implement was four feet across, electrically
driven, the central bowl enclosed in armor plate fastened with
levers like a submarine hatch, the whole mounted on a cement
pillar.

Holabird explained, “There’re only three of these in exist¬
ence. They’re made by Berkeley-Saunders in England. You
know the normal speed, even for a good centrifuge, is about
four thousand revolutions a minute. This does twenty thou¬
sand a minute — fastest in the world. Eh?”

“Jove, they do give you the stuff to work with!” gloated
Martin. (He really did, under Holabird’s handsome influence,
say Jove, not Gosh.)

“Yes, McGurk and Tubbs are the most generous men in the
scientific world. I think you’ll find it very pleasant to be
here, Doctor.”

“I know I will— shall. And Jove, it’s awfully nice of you
to take me around this way.”

“Can’t you see how much I’m enjoying my chance to dis¬
play my knowledge? There’s no form of egotism so agreeable
and so safe as being a cicerone. But we still have the real
wonder of the Institute for to behold, Doctor. Down this
way.”

The real wonder of the Institute had nothing visible to do
with science. It was the Hall, in which lunched the staff, and
in which occasional scientific dinners were given, with Mrs.
McGurk as hostess. Martin gasped and his head went back
as his glance ran from glistening floor to black and gold ceil¬
ing. The Hall rose the full height of the two floors of the
Institute. Clinging to the soaring wall, above the dais on
which lunched the Director and the seven heads of depart¬
ments, was a carved musicians’-gallery. Against the oak panel-

ARROWSMITH

284

ing of the walls were portraits of the pontiffs of science, in
crimson robes, with a vast mural by Maxfield Parrish, and
above all was an electrolier of a hundred globes.

“Gosh — Jove!” said Martin. “I never knew there was such
a room!”

Holabird was generous. He did not smile. “Oh, perhaps
it’s almost too gorgeous. It’s Capitola’s pet creation — Capi-
tola is Mrs. Ross McGurk, wife of the founder; she’s really
an awfully nice woman but she does love Movements and
Associations. Terry Wickett, one of the chemists here, calls
this ‘Bonanza Hall.’ Yet it does inspire you when you come
in to lunch all tired and grubby. Now let’s go call on the
Director. He told me to bring you in.”

After the Babylonian splendor of the Hall, Martin expected
to find the office of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs fashioned like a
Roman bath, but it was, except for a laboratory bench at one
end, the most rigidly business-like apartment he had ever
seen.

Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier,
very scholarly, and perhaps the most powerful American ex¬
ponent of cooperation in science, but he was also a man of the
world, fastidious of boots and waistcoats. He had graduated
from Harvard, studied on the Continent, been professor of
pathology in the University of Minnesota, president of Hart¬
ford University, minister to Venezuela, editor of the Weekly
Statesman and president of the Sanity League, finally Director
of McGurk.

He was a member both of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters and of the Academy of Sciences. Bishops, gen¬
erals, liberal rabbis, and musical bankers dined with him. He
was one of the Distinguished Men to whom the newspapers
turned for authoritative interviews on all subjects.

You realized before he had talked to you for ten minutes
that here was one of the few leaders of mankind who could
discourse on any branch of knowledge, yet could control prac¬
tical affairs and drive stumbling mankind on to sane and rea¬
sonable ideals. Though a Max Gottlieb might in his research
show a certain talent, yet his narrowness, his sour and antic
humor, kept him from developing the broad view of education,
politics, commerce, and all other noble matters which marked
Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs.

But the Director was as cordial to the insignificant Martin

ARRO WSMITH

285

Arrowsmith as though Martin were a visiting senator. He
shook his hand warmly; he unbent in a smile; his baritone
was mellow.

“Dr. Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say
you are welcome here ; I trust we shall show you how welcome
you are! Dr. Gottlieb tells me that you have a natural apti¬
tude for cloistered investigation but that you have been look¬
ing over the fields of medical practise and public health before
you settled down to the laboratory. I can’t tell you how wise
I consider you to have made that broad preliminary survey.
Too many would-be scientists lack the tutored vision which
comes from coordinating all mental domains.”

Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a
broad survey.

“Now you’ll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a
year or more, in getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I
shan’t ask you for any reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels
that you yourself are satisfied with your progress, I shall be
content. Only if there is anything in which I can advise you,
from a perhaps somewhat longer career in science, please be¬
lieve that I shall be delighted to be of aid, and I am quite
sure the same obtains with Dr. Holabird here, though he really
ought to be jealous, because he is one of our youngest workers
— in fact I call him my enfant terrible — but you, I believe,
are only thirty-three, and you quite put the poor fellow’s nose
out!”

Holabird merrily suggested, “Oh, no, Doctor, it’s been put
out long ago. You forget Terry Wickett. He’s under forty.”

“Oh. Him!” murmured Dr. Tubbs.

Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously
with such politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there
might be a serpent even in this paradise.

“Now,” said Dr. Tubbs, “perhaps you might like to glance
around my place here. I pride myself on keeping our card-
indices and letter-files as unimaginatively as though I were an
insurance agent. But there is a certain exotic touch in these
charts.” He trotted across the room to show a nest of narrow
drawers filled with scientific blue-prints.

Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did
Martin ever learn.

He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laugh¬
ingly admitted:

286

ARROWSMITH

“You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am.
I keep asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights
of pathological research for the less fascinating but so very
important and fatiguing cares of the directorship. Yet such
is the weakness of genus homo that sometimes, when I ought
to be attending to practical details, I become obsessed by some
probably absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous am I
that I can’t wait to hasten down the hall to my regular labora¬
tory — I must always have a bench at hand and an experi¬
ment going on. Oh, I’m afraid I’m not the moral man that
I pose as being in public! Here I am married to executive
procedure, and still I hanker for my first love, Milady
Science ! ”

“I think it’s fine you still have an itch for it,” Martin
ventured.

He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had
been doing lately. The bench seemed rather unused.

“And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of
the Institute — my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins.”

Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not
help noticing Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately,
a creamy goddess. She rose to shake hands — a firm, com¬
petent grasp — and to cry in her glorious contralto, “Dr. Tubbs
is so complimentary only because he knows that otherwise I
wouldn’t give him his afternoon tea. We’ve heard so much
about your cleverness from Dr. Gottlieb that I’m almost afraid
to welcome you, Dr. Arrowsmith, but I do want to.”

Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at
the Woolworth Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders —
his own wonders, now! In Rippleton Holabird, so gaily ele¬
gant yet so distinguished, he hoped to have a friend. He
found Dr. Tubbs somewhat sentimental, but he was moved by
his kindness and by Miss Robbins’s recognition. He was in
a haze of future glory when his door was banged open by a
hard-faced, red-headed, soft-shirted man of thirty-six or -eight.

“Arrowsmith?” the intruder growled. “My name is Wickett,
Terry Wickett. I’m a chemist. I’m with Gottlieb. Well, I
noticed the Holy Wren was showing you the menagerie.”

“Dr. Holabird?”

“Him. . . . Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if
Pa Gottlieb let you in. How’s it starting? Which kind are
you going to be? One of the polite birds that uses the Insti-

ARRO WSMITH

287

tute for social climbing and catches him a rich wife, or one of
the roughnecks like me and Gottlieb?

Terry Wickett’s croak was as irritating a sound as Martin
had ever heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that
of Rippleton Holabird:

“I don’t think you need to worry. I happen to be married

already!” . _.

“Oh don’t let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are

cheap/ in this man’s town. Well, did the Holy Wren show

you Gladys the Tart?”

“Huh?” „ „

“Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge.

“Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?”.

“I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?”

“It’s the finest centrifuge I’ve ever seen. Dr. Holabird

said _ ”

“Hell he ought to say something! He went and got old
Tubbs to buy it. He just loves it, Holy Wren does.”

“Why not? It’s the fastest — ” . .

“Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the whole Veremigen , and
made of the best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it al¬
ways blows out fuses, and it spatters the bugs so that you
need a gas-mask if you’re going to use it. . . . And did you
love dear old Tubbsy and the peerless Pearl?

“Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at
that he hasn’t got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb.

“Look here, Wickett— is it Dr. Wickett?” .

“Uh-huh. . . . M.D., Ph.D., but a first-rate chemist just

“Well Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of
your talents should have to associate with idiots like Gott¬
lieb and Tubbs and Holabird. I’ve just left a Chicago clinic
where everybody is nice and sensible. I’d be glad to recom¬
mend vou for a job there!”

“Wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d avoid all the gassing at
lunch in Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrow-
smith, but you look all right to me.

“Thanks!”

Wickett grinned obscenely — red-headed, rough-faced, wiry
and snorted, “By the way, did Plolabird tell you about being
wounded in the first month of the war, when he was a field

288 ARROWSMITH

marshal or a hospital orderly or something in the British
Army?”

“He did not! He didn’t mention the war!”

“He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many
happy, happy years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gott¬
lieb. So long. My lab is right next to yours.”

“Fool!” Martin decided, and, “Well, I can stand him as
long as I can fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But — The
conceited idiot! Gosh, so Holabird was in the war! Invalided
out, I guess. I certainly got back at Wickett on that! ‘Did
he tell you about his being a jolly old hero in the blinkin’
war?’ he said, and I came right back at him, ‘I’m sorry to
displease you,’ I said, ‘but Dr. Holabird did not mention the
war.’ The idiot! Well, I won’t let him worry me.”

And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was
the only one whom he did not find courteous, however brief
their greetings. He did not distinguish among them; for days
most of the twenty researchers remained a blur. He confused
Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology, with the car¬
penter who had come to put up shelves.

The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one
below: tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They
were not particularly noble of aspect, these possible Darwins
and Huxleys and Pasteurs. None of them were wide-browed
Platos. Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max Gottlieb and
perhaps Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers:
brisk featureless young men; thick mustached elders; and
wimpish little men with spectacles, men whose collars did not
meek But there was a steady calm about them ; there was,
Martin believed, no anxiety over money in their voices nor
any restlessness of envy and scandalous gossip. They talked
gravely or frivolously of their work, the one sort of work
that, since it becomes part of the chain of discovered fact, is
eternal, however forgotten the worker’s name.

As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as
ever, referring to himself as “the boy chemist,” speaking of
“this gaudy Institute” and “our trusting new lil brother, Ar¬
rowsmith”) debating with a slight thin-bearded man— Dr.
William T. Smith, assistant in bio-chemistry — the possibility
of increasing the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays,
as he heard one associate-member vituperate another for his
notions of cell -chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as “the Edison

ARROWSMITH

289

of medical science,” Martin perceived new avenues of exciting
research; he stood on a mountain, and unknown valleys,
craggy tantalizing paths, were open to his feet.

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a
week after their coming.

As Holabird’s tweeds made Clay Tredgold’s smartness seem
hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer’s
affairs in Chicago as mechanical and joyless and a little
anxious. Every one whom Martin met at the Holabirds’ flat
was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody: a goodish
editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird’s
graceful casualness.

The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore
fifteen minutes early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old
Venetian glass, Martin demanded, “Doctor, what problems are
you getting after now in your physiology?”

Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a
deprecatory “Would you really like to hear about ’em— you
needn’t be polite, you know!” he dashed into an exposition of
his experiments, drawing sketches on the blank spaces in news¬
paper advertisements, on the back of a wedding invitation, on
the fly-leaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin apolo¬

getically, learned yet gay. . .

“We’re working on the localization of brain functions. I
think we’ve gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it s jolly
exciting, exploring the brain. Look here!”

His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived

and beat under his fingers. .

He threw down the paper. “I say, it’s a shame to inflict my
hobbies on you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me,
how is your work going? Are you comfortable at the Insti¬
tute? Do you find you like people?” _

“Everybody except — To be frank, I’m jarred by Wickett.
Generously, “I know. His manner is slightly aggressive.
But you mustn’t mind him; he’s really an extraordinarily
gifted bio-chemist. He’s a bachelor— gives up everything . for
his work. And he doesn’t really mean half the rude things
he says. He detests me, among others. Has he mentioned

me?”

290

ARROWSMITH

“Why, not especially — ”

“I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about
my experiences in the war, which really isn’t quite altogether
true.”

“Yes,” in a burst, “he did say that.”

“I do rather wish he wouldn’t. So sorry to have offended
him by going and getting wounded. I’ll remember and not
do it again! Such a fuss for a war record as insignificant as
mine! What happened was: when the war broke out in ’14
I was in England, studying under Sherrington. I pretended
to be a Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and
got mine within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was
the end of my magnificent career! Here’s sotnebody arriving.”

His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally
captivated by Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the
dinner in new enchantment.

So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was
scarce more blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life
outside the laboratory.

All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to
be. Then it became a game to wait till the end of the month.
Evenings, in little restaurants, Leora and he would speculate
about it.

The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-
five hundred dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield
Clinic, but on evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen
hundred, and one evening when they had Burgundy he raised
it to thirty-five hundred.

When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed
envelope, he dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora.
In their hotel room they stared at the envelope as though it
was likely to contain poison. Martin opened it shakily; he
stared, and whispered, “Oh, those decent people! They’re
paying me — this is for four hundred and twenty dollars —
they’re paying me five thousand a year!”

Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find
a three-room flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house
near Gramercy Park, and helped her furnish it with good bits,
second-hand. When Martin was permitted to look he cried,
“I hope we stay here for fifty years!”

This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Pres¬
ently they had friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith — the

ARROWSMITH

291

thin-bearded bio-chemist, who had an intelligent taste in
music and German beer — an anatomist whom Martin met at
a Winnemac alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.

Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he
had a brown small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books.
His son Robert had graduated from City College and gone
bustlingly into business. Miriam kept up her music while she
guarded her father — a dumpling of a girl, holy fire behind the
deceptive flesh. After an evening of Gottlieb’s acrid doubting-,
Martin was inspired to hasten to the laboratory and attempt
a thousand new queries into the laws of microorganisms, a
task which usually began with blasphemously destroying all the
work he had recently done.

Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin per¬
ceived that Wickett’s snarls were partly a Clif Clawson mis¬
conception of humor, but partly a resentment, as great as
Gottlieb’s, of the morphological scientists who ticket things
with the nicest little tickets, who name things and rename
them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all night;
he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled,
sitting with a stop-watch before a constant temperature bath
for hours. Now and then it was a relief to have the surly
intentness of Wickett instead of the elegance of Rippleton
Holabird, which demanded from Martin so much painful ele¬
gance in turn, at a time when he was sunk beyond sounding
in his experimentation.

CHAPTER XXVII

His work began fumblingly. There were days when, for all
the joy of it, he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow,
“What are you doing here? You’re the wrong Arrowsmith!
Get out!”

He had isolated twenty strains of staphylococcus germs and
he was testing them to discover which of them was most active
in producing a hemolytic, a blood-disintegrating, toxin, so that
he might produce an antitoxin.

There were picturesque moments when, after centrifuging,
the organisms lay in coiling cloudy masses at the bottoms of
the tubes ; or when the red corpuscles were completely dissolved
and the opaque brick-red liquid turned to the color of pale
wine. But most of the processes were incomparably tedious:
removing samples of the culture every six hours, making salt
suspensions of corpuscles in small tubes, recording the results.

He never knew they were tedious.

Tubbs came in now and then, found him busy, patted his
shoulder, said something which sounded like French and might
even have been French, and gave vague encouragement; while
Gottlieb imperturbably told him to go ahead, and now and
then stirred him by showing his own note-books (they were
full of figures and abbreviations, stupid-seeming as invoices
of calico) or by speaking of his own work, in a vocabulary as
heathenish as Tibetan magic:

“Arrhenius and Madsen have made a contribution toward
bringing immunity reactions under the mass action law, but I
hope to show that antigen-antibody combinations occur in
stoicheiometric proportions when certain variables are held
constant.”

“Oh, yes, I see,” said Martin; and to himself: “Well, I
darn’ near a quarter understand that! Oh, Lord, if they’ll
only give me a little time and not send me back to tacking
up diphtheria posters!”

When he had obtained a satisfactory toxin, Martin began his

292

ARROWSMITH 293

effort to find an antitoxin. He made vast experiments with no
results. Sometimes he was certain that he had something, but
when he rechecked his experiments he was bleakly certain that
he hadn t. Once he rushed into Gottlieb’s laboratory with the
announcement of the antitoxin, whereupon with affection and
several discomforting questions and the present of a box of
real Egyptian cigarettes, Gottlieb showed him that he had not
considered certain dilutions.

With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one char¬
acteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-rang-
ing, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity,
and it drove him on.

While he puttered his insignificant way through the early
years of the Great European War, the McGurk Institute had
a lively existence under its placid surface.

Martin may not have learned much in the matter of anti¬
bodies but he did learn the secret of the Institute, and he saw
that behind all its quiet industriousness was Capitola McGurk,
the Great WTite Uplifter.

Capitola, Mrs. Ross McGurk, had been opposed to woman
suffrage — until she learned that women were certain to get the
vote — but she was a complete controller of virtuous affairs.
Ross McGurk had bought the Institute not only to glorify him¬
self but to divert Capitola and keep her itching fingers out of
his shipping and mining and lumber interests, which would
not too well have borne the investigations of a Great White
Uplifter.

Ross McGurk was at the time a man of fifty-four, second
generation of California railroad men; a graduate of Yale;
big, suave, dignified, cheerful, unscrupulous. Even in 1908,
when he had founded the Institute, he had had too many
houses, too many servants, too much food, and no children,
because Capitola considered “that sort of thing detrimental to
women with large responsibilities.” In the Institute he found
each year more satisfaction, more excuse for having lived.

When Gottlieb arrived, McGurk went up to look him over.
McGurk had bullied Dr. Tubbs now and then; Tubbs was com¬
pelled to scurry to his office as though he were a messenger
boy; yet when he saw the saturnine eyes of Gottlieb, McGurk

294 ARROWSMITH

looked interested; and the two men, the bulky, clothes-con-
scious, powerful, reticent American and the cynical, simple,
power-despising European, became friends. McGurk would
slip away from a conference affecting the commerce of a whole
West Indian island to sit on a high stool, silent, and watch
Gottlieb work.

“Some day when I quit hustling and wake up, I’m going to
become your gar^on, Max,” said McGurk, and Gottlieb an¬
swered, “I don’t know — you haf imagination, Ross, but I
t’ink you are too late to get a training in reality. Now if you
do not mind eating at Childs’s, we will avoid your very ex-
postulatory Regal Hall, and I shall invite you to lunch.”

But Capitola did not join their communion.

Gottlieb’s arrogance had returned, and with Capitola
McGurk he needed it. She had such interesting little prob¬
lems for her husband’s pensioners to attack. Once, in excite¬
ment, she visited Gottlieb’s laboratory to tell him that large
numbers of persons die of cancer, and why didn’t he drop this
anti-whatever-it-was and find a cure for cancer, which would
be ever so nice for all of them.

But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird
had agreed to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute
to one of her most intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to
Gottlieb, merely asking, “Would it be too much trouble for you
to go down and open your lab, so we can all enjoy just a tiny
peep at it?” and he answered:

“It would! Goodnight!”

Capitola protested to her husband. He listened — at least he
seemed to listen — and remarked:

“Cap, I don’t mind your playing the fool with the footmen.
They’ve got to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I’ll
simply shut up the whole Institute, and then you won’t have
anything to talk about at the Colony Club. And it certainly
does beat the deuce that a man worth thirty million dollars—
at least a fellow that’s got that much — can’t find a clean pair
of pajamas. No, I won't have a valet! Oh, please now, Capi¬
tola, please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep,
will you!”

But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of
the monthly dinners which she gave at the Institute.

ARRO WSMITH

295

The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin
and Leora witnessed was a particularly important and ex¬
planatory dinner, because the guest of honor was Major-
General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London surgeon, who was in
America with a British War Mission. He had already beauti¬
fully let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been
Sir Isaac’d by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry
Wickett; he remembered meeting Rippleton Holabird in
London, or said he remembered; and he admired Gladys the
Centrifuge.

The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett,
who hitherto could be depended upon to stay decently away,
now appeared, volunteering to the wife of an ex-ambassador,
“I simply couldn’t duck this spread, with dear Sir Isaac com¬
ing. Say, if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t hardly think my
dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that Sir
Isaac is getting so he doesn’t tear the carpet with his spurs
any more? I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?”

There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfort¬
able scientists explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few
words, just what they were up to and what in the next twenty
years they hoped to be up to; there were the cooing ladies
themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke, “But I’m
afraid you haven’t yet made it as clear as you might.” There
were the cooing ladies’ husbands — college graduates, manipu¬
lators of oil stocks or of corporation law — who sat ready to
give to anybody who desired it their opinion that while anti¬
toxins might be racy, what we really needed was a good sub¬
stitute for rubber.

There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.

And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry
Wickett, saying to quite an important woman, one of Capi-
tola’s most useful friends, “Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-
1-i-e-b but it’s pronounced Gottdamn.”

But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as
Martin and Leora and such totally absent members as Max
Gottlieb were few, and the dinner waxed magnificently to a
love-feast when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard paid com¬
pliments to each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of France,
to brave little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British love

296

ARROWSMITH

of privacy, and to the extremely interesting things a young
man with a sense of cooperation might do in modern science.

The guests were conducted through the Institute. They
inspected the marine biology aquarium, the pathological
museum, and the animal house, at sight of which one sprightly
lady demanded of Wickett, “Oh, the poor little guinea pigs
and darling rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don’t you think
it would be ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and
just worked with your test-tubes?”

A popular physician, whose practise was among rich women,
none of them west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady,
“I think you’re absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor
wee little beasties to get my knowledge!”

With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went
away.

The sprightly lady said, “You see, he didn’t dare stand up
to a real argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know
how wonderful Ross McGurk and Dr. Tubbs and all of you
are, but I must say I’m disappointed in your laboratories. I’d
expected there’d be such larky retorts and electric furnaces
and everything but, honestly, I don’t see a single thing that’s
interesting, and I do think all you clever people ought to do
something for us, now that you’ve coaxed us all the way down
here. Can’t you or somebody create life out of turtle eggs,
or whatever it is? Oh, please do! Pretty please! Or at
least, do put on one of these cunnin’ dentist coats that you
wear.”

Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a
furious Leora, who in the taxicab announced that she had
desired to taste the champagne-cup which she had observed on
the buffet, and that her husband was little short of a fool.

Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder
about the perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb
should be so insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the in¬
dustrious head of the Department of Epidemiology, and why
Dr. Sholtheis should endure the insults; to wonder why Dr.
Tubbs, when he wandered into one’s laboratory, should gurgle,
“The one thing for you to keep in view in all your work is
the ideal of cooperation”; to wonder why so ardent a physi-

ARROWSMITH 297

ologist as Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard
conferring with Tubbs instead of sweating at his bench.

Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research
which had taken his name into scientific journals throughout
the world: he had studied the effect of the extirpation of the
anterior lobes of a dog’s brain on its ability to find its way
through the laboratory. Martin had read of that research
before he had thought of going to McGurk; on his arrival he
was thrilled to have it chronicled by the master himself; but
when he had heard Holabird refer to it a dozen times he was
considerably less thrilled, and he speculated whether all his
life Holabird would go on being “the man — you remember —
the chap that did the big stunt, whatever it was, with locomo¬
tion in dogs or something.”

Martin speculated still more as he perceived that all his
colleagues were secretly grouped in factions.

Tubbs, Holabird, and perhaps Tubbs’s secretary, Pearl
Robbins, were the ruling caste. It was murmured that Hola¬
bird hoped some day to be made Assistant Director, an office
which was to be created for him. Gottlieb, Terry Wickett,
and Dr. Nicholas Yeo, that long-mustached and rustic biolo¬
gist whom Martin had first taken for a carpenter, formed an
independent faction of their own, and however much he dis¬
liked the boisterous Wickett, Martin was dragged into it.

Dr. William Smith, with his little beard and a notion of
mushrooms formed in Paris, kept to himself. Dr. Sholtheis,
who had been born to a synagogue in Russia but who was now
the most zealous high-church Episcopalian in Yonkers, was
constantly in his polite small way trying to have his scientific
work commended by Gottlieb. In the Department of Bio-
Physics, the good-natured chief was reviled and envied by his
own assistant. And in the whole Institute there was not one
man who would, in all states of liquor, assert that the work
of any other scientist anywhere was completely sound, or
that there was a single one of his rivals who had not stolen
ideas from him. No rocking-chair clique on a summer-hotel
porch, no knot of actors, ever whispered more scandal or
hinted more warmly of complete idiocy in their confreres than
did these uplifted scientists.

But these discoveries Martin could shut out by closing his
door, and he had that to do now which deafened him to the
mutters of intrigue.

298

ARROWSMITH

For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but
curtly summoned him. In a corner of Gottlieb’s office, a den
opening from his laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a
cigarette and looking sardonic.

Gottlieb observed, “Martin, I haf taken the privilege of
talking you over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf
done well enough now so it is time you stop puttering and go
to work.”

“I thought I was working, sir!”

All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he
saw himself driven back to Pickerbaughism.

Wickett intruded, “No, you haven’t. You’ve just been show¬
ing that you’re a bright boy who might work if he only knew
something.”

While Martin turned on Wickett with a “Who the devil are
you?” expression, Gottlieb went on:

“The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a
little mathematics. If you are not going to be a cookbook
bacteriologist, like most of them, you must be able to handle
some of the fundamentals of science. All living things are
physico-chemical machines. Then how can you make progress
if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you know
physical chemistry without much mathematics?”

“Yuh,” said Wickett, “you’re lawn-mowing and daisy-pick¬
ing, not digging.”

Martin faced them. “But rats, Wickett, a man can’t know
everything. I’m a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me
a fellow ought to use his insight, not just a chest of tools, to
make discoveries. A good sailor could find his way at sea
even if he didn’t have instruments, and a whole Lusitania-ivl
of junk wouldn’t make a good sailor out of a dub. Man ought
to develop his brain, not depend on tools.”

“Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence,
a sailor that cruised off without ’em would be a chump!” .

For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely,
before the gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the
while he knew that he was sickeningly ignorant.

They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his
note-books, Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared
at Gottlieb. The man meant so much that he could be furious

ARRO WSMITH

299

with him as he would have been with Leora, with his own
self.

“I’m sorry you think I don’t know anything,” he raged, and
departed with the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into
his own laboratory, felt freed, then wretched. Without voli¬
tion, like a drunken man, he stormed to Wickett’s room, pro¬
testing, “I suppose you’re right. My physical chemistry is nix,
and my math rotten. What am I going to do — what am I
going to do?”

The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, “Well, for Pete’s
sake, Slim, don’t worry. The old man and I were just egging
you on. Fact is, he’s tickled to death about the careful way
you’re starting in. About the math — probably you’re better
off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now; you’ve for¬
gotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any.
Gosh all fishhooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge —
from the Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old
booze-hoisting Helleens — and the way most of the science boys
resent having to stop writing little jeweled papers or giving
teas and sweat at getting some knowledge certainly does make
me a grand booster for the human race. My own math isn’t
any too good, Slim, but if you’d like to have me come around
evenings and tutor you — Free, I mean!”

Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry
Wickett; thus began a change in Martin’s life whereby he gave
up three or four hours of wholesome sleep each night to grind
over matters which every one is assumed to know, and almost
every one does not know.

He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of
it; cursed over the competition of the indefatigable A and the
indolent B who walk from Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor;
and finished the subject, with a spurt of something like interest
in regard to quadratic equations, in six weeks . . . while
Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and laughed
at the tutor’s jokes.

By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had
reviewed trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was find¬
ing differentia] calculus romantic. But he made the mistake
of telling Terry Wickett how much he knew.

Terry croaked, “Don’t trust math too much, son,” and he so
confused him with references to the thermo-dynamical deriva¬
tion of the mass action law, and to the oxidation reduction

ARROWSMITH

300

potential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again
saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.

He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and
Galileo, Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He
became completely bogged in Newton’s “Fluxions”; he spoke
of Newton to Tubbs and found that the illustrious Director
knew nothing about him. He cheerfully mentioned this to
Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a “nouveau
cultured,” as a “typical enthusiastic convert,” and so returned
to the work whose end is satisfying because there is never
an end.

His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing.
When Tubbs peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless
young man going about his tests of hemolytic toxins with no
apparent flair for the Real Big Thing in Science, which was
cooperation and being efficient. Tubbs tried to set him straight
with “Are you quite sure you’re following a regular demarked
line in your work?”

It was Leora who bore the real tedium.

She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one’s shoulder, not
nine minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she
napped inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat,
while he worked over his dreary digit-infested books till
one, till two, and she politely awoke to let him worry at her,
“But look here now, I’ve got to keep up my research at the
same time. God, I am so tired!”

She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape
Cod, in March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham,
and fumed, “I’m going back and tell Terry and Gottlieb they
can go to the devil with their crazy physical chemistry. I’ve
had enough, now I’ve done math,” and she commented, “Yes,
I certainly would — though isn’t it funny how Dr. Gottlieb
always seems to be right?”

He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that
he did not realize the world was about to be made safe for
democracy. He was a little dazed when America entered the
war. '

Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the
Institute to the War Department.

ARRO WSMITH

301

All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two
others who declined to be so honored, were made officers
and told to run out and buy nice uniforms.

Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major,
Martin and Wickett and Billy Smith were Captains. But the
gargons had no military rank whatever, nor any military duties
except the polishing of brown riding-boots and leather puttees,
which the several warriors wore as pleased their fancies or their
legs. And the most belligerent of all, Miss Pearl Robbins, she
who at tea heroically slaughtered not only German men but
all their women and viperine children, was wickedly unrecog¬
nized and had to make up a uniform for herself.

The only one of them who got nearer to the front than
Liberty Street was Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for
leave, was transferred to the artillery, and sailed off to France.

He apologized to Martin: “I’m ashamed of chucking my
work like this, and I certainly don’t want to kill Germans —
I mean not any more’n I want to kill most people — but I
never could resist getting into a big show. Say, Slim, keep
an eye on Pa Gottlieb, will you? This has hit him bad. He’s
got a bunch of nephews and so on in the German army, and
the patriots like Big Foot Pearl will give an exhibit of ideal¬
ism by persecuting him. So long, Slim, take care y’self.”

Martin had vaguely protested at being herded into the army.
The war was to him chiefly another interruption to his work,
like Pickerbaughism, like earning his living at Wheatsylvania.
But when he had gone strutting forth in uniform, it was so
enjoyable that for several weeks he was a standard patriot.
He had never looked so well, so taut and erect, as in khaki. It
was enchanting to be saluted by privates, quite as enchanting
to return the salute in the dignified, patronizing, all-comrades-
together splendor which Martin shared with the other doctors,
professors, lawyers, brokers, authors, and former socialist intel¬
lectuals who were his fellow-officers.

But in a month the pleasures of being a hero became me¬
chanical, and Martin longed for soft shirts, easy shoes, and
clothes with reasonable pockets. His puttees were a nuisance
to wear and an inferno to put on; his collar pinched his neck
and jabbed his chin ; and it was wearing on a man who sat up
till three, on the perilous duty of studying calculus, to be
snappy at every salute.

Under the martinet eye of Col. Director Dr. A. DeWitt

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ARROWSMITH

Tubbs he had to wear his uniform, at least recognizable por¬
tions of it, at the Institute, but by evening he slipped into
the habit of sneaking into citizen clothes, and when he went
with Leora to the movies he had an agreeable feeling of being
Absent Without Leave, of risking at every street corner arrest
bv the Military Police and execution at dawn.

Unfortunately no M.P. ever looked at him. But one eve¬
ning when in an estimable and innocent manner he was look¬
ing at the remains of a gunman who had _ just been murdered
by another gunman, he realized that Major Rippleton Ho a-
bird was standing by, glaring. For once the Major was un-

Pl^Captain, does it seem to you that this is quite playing
the game to wear mufti? We, unfortunately, with our scien¬
tific work, haven’t the privilege of joining the Boys who are
up against the real thing, but we are under orders just as if
we were in the trenches — where some of us would so much
like to be again! Captain, I trust I shall never again see you
breaking the order about being in uniform, or uh

Martin blurted to Leora, later: _

“I’m sick of hearing about his being wounded. Nothing
that I can see to prevent his going back to the trenches.
Wound’s all right now. I want to be patriotic, but my pa¬
triotism is chasing antitoxins, doing my job, not wearing a
particular kind of pants and a particular set of ideas about the
Germans. Mind you, I’m anti-German all right— I think
they’re probably just as bad as we are. Oh, let’s go back and
do some more calculus. . . . Darling, my working nights
doesn’t bore you too much, does it?” . .

Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic,
she could be unannoyingly silent.

At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the
only defender of his country who was not comfortable in the
garb of heroes. The most dismal of the staff-members was
Dr. Nicholas Yeo, the Yankee sandy-mustached head of the
Department of Biology.

Yeo had put on Major’s uniform, but he never felt neigh¬
borly with it. (He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr.
Tubbs had told him he was, and. he knew that this was a
Major’s uniform, because the clothing salesman said so.) He
walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy, depreca¬
tory way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots;

ARROWSMITH

303

and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button
his blouse over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often con¬
fided, you could buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.

But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely
explained to Martin, as they were marching to the completely
militarized dining-hall :

“Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this
saluting? Darn it, I never can figure out what all these
insignia mean. One time I took a Salvation Army Lieutenant
for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a Portygee. But
I’ve got the idea now!” Yeo laid his finger beside his large
nose, and produced wisdom: “Whenever I see any fellow in
uniform that looks older than I am, I salute him — my nephew,
Ted, has drilled me so I salute swell now — and if he don’t
salute back, well, Lord, I just think about my work and don’t
fuss. If you look at it scientifically, this military life isn’t so
awful’ hard after all!”

Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to
America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradi¬
tion, in its contact with the realities of cornfields and blizzards
and town-meetings, had set its face against the puerile pride
of war. He believed that he had ceased to be a German, now,
and become a countryman of Lincoln.

The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge
from Winnemac, which had ever broken his sardonic serenity.
In the war he could see no splendor nor hope, but only crawl¬
ing tragedy. He treasured his months of work, and good talk
in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French and
English and Italian friends as he loved his ancient Korpsbruder,
and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Ger¬
mans with whom he had drudged and drunk.

His sister’s sons — on home-craving vacations he had seen
them, in babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood ■
went out with the Kaiser’s colors in 19x4; one of them became
an Oberst, much decorated, one existed insignificantly, and one
was dead and stinking in ten days. This he sadly endured,
as later he endured his son Robert’s going out as an American
lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this
man to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than

304

ARROWSMITH

kindly flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmil i-
taristic America to which he had emigrated in protest against

^Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Ger¬
mans were baby-killers, universities barring the language of
Heine orchestras outlawing the music of Beethoven, professors
in uniform bellowing at clerks, and the clerks never protesting.

It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love tor
America or to his egotism, that he should have guessed so
grotesquely; it is curious that he who had so denounced the
machine-made education of the land should yet have been
surprised when it turned blithely to the old, old, mechanical
mockeries of war.

When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himselt
regarded not as the great and impersonal immunologist but as

a suspect German Jew. .

True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look
upon him dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect
and stiff when they passed in the corridor. When Gottlieb
insisted to Tubbs at lunch, “I am villing to admit every virtue
of the French — I am very fond of that so individual people —
but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that there must be
some good Germans out of sixty millions,’ then Col. Dr. Tubbs
commanded, “In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem
to me particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gott¬
lieb!”

In shops and on the elevated trains, little red-faced sweaty
people when they heard his accent glared at him, and growled
one to another, “There’s one of them damn’ barb’rous well¬
poisoning Huns!” and however contemptuous he might be,
however much he strove for ignoring pride, their nibbling
reduced him from arrogant scientist to an insecure, raw-

nerved, shrinking old man.

And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to
know him, a hostess whose maiden name was Straufnabel and
who had married into the famous old Anglican family of
Rosemont, when Gottlieb bade her “Auj Wiedersehen” cried
out upon him, “Dr. Gottlieb, I’m very sorry, but the use of
that disgusting language is not permitted in this house!”

He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac
and the Hunziker factory; he had begun to expand, to enter¬
tain people — scientists, musicians, talkers. Now he was thrust

ARRO WSMITH

305

back into himself. With Terry gone, he trusted only Miriam
and Martin and Ross McGurk ; and his deep-set wrinkle-lidded
eyes looked ever on sadness.

But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought
to have in the window of her house a Service Flag with a star
for every person at the Institute who had put on uniform.

She took it quite seriously, and did it.

VIII

The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist
entirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to
Col. Dr. Tubbs’s luncheon lectures on “the part America will
inevitably play in the reconstruction of a Democratic Europe.”

They prepared sera ; the assistant in the Department of Bio-
Physics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy
Smith, who six months before had been singing Student Lieder
at Luchow’s, was working on poison gas to be used against
all singers of Lieder; and to Martin was assigned the manu¬
facture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely ground typhoid
and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job, and
dull. Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it
almost every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual
and he unholily welcomed scientific papers in which lipovac-
cines were condemned as inferior to ordinary salt solutions.

He was conscious of Gottlieb’s sorrowing and tried to com¬
fort him.

It was Martin’s most pitiful fault that he was not very
kind to shy people and lonely people and stupid old people;
he was not cruel to them, he simply was unconscious of them
or so impatient of their fumbling that he avoided them. When¬
ever Leora taxed him with it he grumbled:

“Well, but — I’m too much absorbed in my work, or in
doping stuff out, to waste time on morons. And it’s a good
thing. Most people above the grade of hog do so much chas¬
ing around after a lot of vague philanthropy that they never
get anything done — and most of your confounded shy people
get spiritually pauperized. Oh, it’s so much easier to be good-
natured and purring and self-congratulatory and generally foot¬
less than it is to pound ahead and keep yourself strictly for
your own work, the work that gets somewhere. Very few
people have the courage to be decently selfish — not answer

306

ARROWSMITH

i ttprc. _ and demand the right to work. If they had their way,

these sentimentalists would’ve had a Newton-yes, or prob-
ahlv a Christ'— giving up everything they did for the world
to Iddress meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old
maids. Nothing takes so much courage as to keep hard and
clear-headed.”

And he hadn’t even that courage.

When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind
to all sorts of alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then
drift back into his absorption. There were but two people
whose unhappiness could always pierce him: Leora and Gott-

^Though he was busier than he had known any one could
ever be, ° with lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry
in the evening and, at all sorts of intense hours between the
continuation of his staphylolysin research, he gave what .time
he could to seeking out Gottlieb and warming his vanity by

16 Then1 ^research wiped out everything else, made him
forget Gottlieb and Leora and all his briskness about studying
made him turn his war work over to others, and confounded
night and day in one insane flaming blur as he realized tha
he had something not unworthy of a Gottlieb, something at
the mysterious source of life.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his
good wife Leora, wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel
kind of discouraged. I haven’t accomplished a darn’ thing in
this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No good. And I’m
hanged if I’ll study calculus this evening. Let’s go to the
movies. Won’t even change to regular human clothes. Too
tired.”

“All right, honey,” said Leora. “But let’s have dinner here.
I bought a wonderful ole fish this afternoon.”

Through the film Martin gave his opinion, as a captain and
as a doctor, that it seemed improbable a mother should not
know her daughter after an absence of ten years. He was
restless and rational, which is not a mood in which to view
the cinema. When they came blinking out of that darkness lit
only from the shadowy screen, he snorted, “I’m going back to
the lab. I’ll put you in a taxi.”

“Oh, let the beastly thing go for one night.”

“Now that’s unfair! I haven’t worked late for three or
four nights now!”

“Then take me along.”

“Nope. I have a hunch I may be working all night.”

Liberty Street, as he raced along it, was sleeping below
its towers. It was McGurk’s order that the elevator to the
Institute should run all night, and indeed three or four of the
twenty staff-members did sometimes use it after respectable
hours.

That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylo¬
coccus bacteria from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the
Lower Manhattan Hospital, a carbuncle which was healing with
unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit of the pus in broth and
incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of bacteria had
appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the

flask to the incubator. . .

He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in his

307

308

ARROWSMITH

laboratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to
the lights on the blue-black river, smoked a little, thought
what a dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert
Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else who was
handy to his memory before he absent-mindedly wavered to the
incubator, and found that the flask, in which there should
have been a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any
signs of bacteria — of staphylococci.

“Now what the hell!” he cried. “Why, the.broth’s as clear
as when I seeded it! Now what the— Think of this fool
accident coming up just when I was going to start something

new!” .,

He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor,

to his laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light,
made certain that he had seen aright. He fretfully prepared
a slide from the flask contents and examined it under the
microscope. He discovered nothing but shadows of what had
been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell
substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battle¬
field. .

He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired
eyes, reflectively rubbed his neck — his blouse was off, his collar
on the floor, his shirt open at the throat. He considered:

“Something funny here. This culture was growing all right,
and now it’s committed suicide. Never heard of bugs doing
that before. I’ve hit something! What caused it? Some
chemical change? Something organic?”

Now in Martin Arrowsmith there were no decorative hero¬
isms, no genius for amours, no exotic wit, no edifyingly borne
misfortunes. He presented neither picturesque elegance nor a
moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse
honesty; a young man often unkindly, often impolite. But
he had one gift: a curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordi¬
nary. Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton
Holabird, he would have chucked the contents of the flask into
the sink, avowed with pretty modesty, “Silly! I’ve made some
error!” and gone his ways. But Martin, being Martin, walked
prosaically up and down his laboratory, snarling, “Now there
was some cause for that, and I’m going to find out what it
was.”

He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to
Leora and tell her that splendor was happening, and she wasn’t

ARROWS M I TH

309

to worry about him. He fumbled down the corridor, lighting
matches, trying to find electric switches.

At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new
McGurk Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed
suicide. As Martin groped he was shakily conscious of feet
padding behind him, of shapes which leered from doorways and
insolently vanished, of ancient bodiless horrors, and when he
found the switch he rejoiced in the blessing and security of
sudden light that recreated the world.

At the Institute telephone switchboard he plugged in wher¬
ever it seemed reasonable. Once he thought he was talking
to Leora, but it proved to be a voice, sexless and intolerant,
which said “Nummer pleeeeeze” with a taut alertness impos¬
sible to any one so indolent as Leora. Once it was a voice
which slobbered, “Is this Sarah?” then, “I don’t want you!
Ring off, will yuh!” Once a girl pleaded, “Honestly, Billy, I
did try to get there but the boss came in at five and he said — ”

As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven
million people hungry for sleep or love or money.

He observed, “Oh, rats, I guess Lee’ll have gone to bed by
now,” and felt his way back to the laboratory.

A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with
his head back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for
like cases of microorganisms committing suicide or being slain
without perceptible cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library,
consulted the American and English authorities and, labori¬
ously, the French and German. He found nothing.

He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living
staphylococci in the pus which he had used for seeding the
broth — none there to die. At a hectic run, not stopping for
lights, bumping corners and sliding on the too perfect tile
floor, he skidded down the stairs and galloped through the cor¬
ridors to his room. He found the remains of the original
pus, made a smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-
violet, nervously dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye.
He sprang to the microscope. As he bent over the brass tube
and focused the objective, into the gray-lavender circular field
of vision rose to existence the grape-like clusters of staphylo¬
coccus germs, purple dots against the blank plane.

“Staph in it, all right!” he shouted.

Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, every¬
thing, as he charged into preparations for an experiment, his

3io

ARROWSMITH

first great experiment. He paced furiously, rather dizzy. He
shook himself into calmness and settled down at a table,
among rings and spirals of cigarette smoke, to list on small
sheets of paper all the possible causes of suicide in the bac¬
teria— all the questions he had to answer and the experiments
which should answer them.

It might be that alkali in an improperly cleaned flask had
caused the clearing of the culture. It might be some anti¬
staph substance existing in the pus, or something liberated by
the staphylococci themselves. It might be some peculiarity
of this particular broth.

Each of these had to be tested.

He pried open the door of the glass-storeroom, shattering
the lock. He took new flasks, cleaned them, plugged them
with cotton, and placed them in the hot-air oven to sterilize.
He found other batches of broth — as a matter of fact he
stole them, from Gottlieb’s private and highly sacred supply
in the ice-box. He filtered some of the clarified culture through
a sterile porcelain filter, and added it to his regular staphylo¬
coccus strains.

And, perhaps most important of all, he discovered that he
was out. of cigarettes.

Incredulously he slapped each of his pockets, and went the
round and slapped them all over again. He looked into his
discarded military blouse; had a cheering idea about having
seen cigarettes in a drawer; did not find them; and brazenly
marched into the room where hung the aprons and jackets
of the technicians. Furiously he pilfered pockets, and found
a dozen beautiful cigarettes in a wrinkled and flattened paper
case.

To test each of the four possible causes of the flask’s clear¬
ing he prepared and seeded with bacteria a series of flasks
under varying conditions, and set them away in the incubator
at body temperature. Till the last flask was put away, his
hand was steady, his worn face calm. He was above all ner¬
vousness, free from all uncertainty, a professional going about
his business.

By this time it was six o’clock of a fine wide August morn¬
ing, and as he ceased his swift work, as taut nerves slackened,
he looked out of his lofty window and was conscious of the
world below: bright roofs, jubilant towers, and a high-decked
Sound steamer swaggering up the glossy river.

ARRO WSMITH

3ii

He was completely fagged; he was, like a surgeon after a
battle, like a reporter during an earthquake, perhaps a little
insane; but sleepy he was not. He cursed the delay involved
in the growth of the bacteria, without which he could not dis¬
cover the effect of the various sorts of broths and bacterial
strains, but choked his impatience.

He mounted the noisy slate stairway to the lofty world of
the roof. He listened at the door of the Institute’s animal
house. The guinea pigs, awake and nibbling, were making
a sound like that of a wet cloth rubbed on glass in window¬
cleaning. He stamped his foot, and in fright they broke out
in their strange sound of fear, like the cooing of doves.

He marched violently up and down, refreshed by the soar¬
ing sky, till he was calmed to hunger. Again he went pillag¬
ing. He found chocolate belonging to an innocent technician;
he even invaded the office of the Director and in the desk of
the Diana-like Pearl Robbins unearthed tea and a kettle (as
well as a lip-stick, and a love-letter beginning “My Little
Ickles”). He made himself a profoundly bad cup of tea, then,
his whole body dragging, returned to his table to set down
elaborately, in a shabby, nearly-filled note-book, every step of
his experiment.

After seven he worked out the operation of the telephone
switchboard and called the Lower Manhattan Hospital. Could
Dr. Arrowsmith have some more pus from the same carbuncle?
What? It’d healed? Curse it! No more of that material.

He hesitated over waiting for Gottlieb’s arrival, to tell him
of the discovery, but determined to keep silence till he should
have determined whether it was an accident. Eyes wide, too
wrought up to sleep in the subway, he fled uptown to tell
Leora. He had to tell some one! Waves of fear, doubt, cer¬
tainty, and fear again swept over him; his ears rang and his
hands trembled.

He rushed up to the flat; he bawled “Lee! Lee!” before he
had unlocked the door. And she was gone.

He gaped. The flat breathed emptiness. He searched it
again. She had slept there, she had had a cup of coffee, but
she had vanished.

He was at once worried lest there had been an accident, and
furious that she should not have been here at the great hour.
Sullenly he made breakfast for himself. ... It is strange that
excellent bacteriologists and chemists should scramble eggs so

312

ARROWSMITH

waterily, should make such bitter coffee and be so casual about
dirty spoons. ... By the time he had finished the mess he
was ready to believe that Leora had left him forever. He
quavered, “I’ve neglected her a lot.” Sluggishly, an old man
now, he started for the Institute, and at the entrance to the
subway he met her.

She wailed, “I was so worried! I couldn’t get you on the
’phone. I went clear down to the Institute to see what’d
happened to you.”

He kissed her, very competently, and raved, “God, woman,
I’ve got it! The real big stuff! I’ve found something, not a
chemical you put in I mean, that eats bugs — dissolves ’em —
kills ’em. May be a big new step in therapeutics. Oh, no,
rats, I don’t suppose it really is. Prob’ly just another of my
bulls.”

She sought to reassure him but he did not wait. He dashed
down to the subway, promising to telephone to her. By ten,
he was peering into his incubator.

There was a cloudy appearance of bacteria in all the flasks
except those in which he had used broth from the original
alarming flask. In these, the mysterious murderer of germs
had prevented the growth of the new bacteria which he had
introduced.

“Great stuff,” he said.

He returned the flasks to the incubator, recorded his observa¬
tions, went again to the library, and searched handbooks,
bound proceedings of societies, periodicals in three languages.
He had acquired a reasonable scientific French and German.
It is doubtful whether he could have bought a drink or asked
the way to the Kursaal in either language, but he understood
the universal Hellenistic scientific jargon, and he pawed
through the heavy books, rubbing his eyes, which were filled
with salty fire.

He remembered that he was an army officer and had lipo-
vaccine to make this morning. He went to work, but he was
so twitchy that he ruined the batch, called his patient gargon
a fool, and after this injustice sent him out for a pint of
whisky.

He had to have a confidant. He telephoned to Leora,
lunched with her expensively, and asserted, “It still looks as
if there were something to it.” He was back in the Institute
every hour that afternoon, glancing at his flasks, but between

ARRO WSMITH

3i3

he tramped the streets, creaking with weariness, drinking too
much coffee.

Every five minutes it came to him, as a quite new and
ecstatic idea, “Why don’t I go to sleep?” then remembered,
and groaned, “No, I’ve got to keep going and watch every
step. Can’t leave it, or I’ll have to begin all over again. But
I’m so sleepy! Why don’t I go to sleep?”

He dug down, before six, into a new layer of strength, and
at six his examination showed that the flasks containing the
original broth still had no growth of bacteria, and the flasks
which he had seeded with the original pus had, like the first
eccentric flask, after beginning to display a good growth of
bacteria cleared up again under the slowly developing attack
of the unknown assassin.

He sat down, drooping with relief. He had it! He stated
in the conclusions of his first notes:

“I have observed a principle, which I shall temporarily call
the X Principle, in pus from a staphylococcus infection, which
checks the growth of several strains of staphylococcus, and
which dissolves the staphylococci from the pus in question.”

When he had finished, at seven, his head was on his note¬
book and he was asleep.

He awoke at ten, went home, ate like a savage, slept again,
and was in the laboratory before dawn. His next rest was an
hour that afternoon, sprawled on his laboratory table, with
his gargon on guard; the next, a day and a half later, was
eight hours in bed, from dawn till noon.

But in dreams he was constantly upsetting a rack of test-
tubes or breaking a flask. He discovered an X Principle which
dissolved chairs, tables, human beings. He went about smear¬
ing it on Bert Tozers and Dr. Bissexes and fiendishly watch¬
ing them vanish, but accidentally he dropped it on Leora and
saw her fading, and he woke screaming to find the real Leora’s
arms about him, while he sobbed, “Oh, I couldn’t do anything
without you! Don’t ever leave me! I do love you so, even
if this damned work does keep me tied up. Stay with me!”

While she sat by him on the frowsy bed, gay in her gingham,
he went to sleep, to wake up three hours later and start off for
the Institute, his eyes blood-glaring and set. She was ready
for him with strong coffee, waiting on him silently, looking
at him proudly, while he waved his arms, babbling:

“Gottlieb better not talk any more about the importance

arrowsmxth

of new observations! The X Principle may not just apply to
staph. Maybe you can sic it on any bug— cure any germ
disease by it. Bug that lives on bugs! Or maybe it’s a chemi¬
cal principle, an enzyme. Oh, I don’t know. But I will!”

As he bustled to the Institute he swelled with the certainty
that after years of stumbling he had arrived. He had visions
of his name in journals and textbooks; of scientific meetings
cheering him. He had been an unknown among the experts
of the Institute, and now he pitied all of them. But when he
was back at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded and
he was the sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker.
Before him, supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-
passes of work opened, and in him was new power.

For a week Martin’s life had all the regularity of an escaped
soldier in the enemy’s country, with the same agitation and
the same desire to prowl at night. He was always sterilizing
flasks, preparing media of various hydrogen-ion concentrations,
copying his old notes into a new book lovingly labeled “X
Principle, Staph,” and adding to it further observations. He
tried, elaborately, with many flasks and many reseedings, to
determine whether the X Principle would perpetuate itself
indefinitely, whether when it was transmitted from tube to
new tube of bacteria it would reappear, whether, growing by
cell-division automatically, it was veritably a germ, a sub-germ
infecting germs.

During the week Gottlieb occasionally peered over his shoul¬
der, but Martin was unwilling to report until he should have
proof, and one good night’s sleep, and perhaps even a shave.

When he was sure that the X Principle did reproduce itself
indefinitely, so that in the tenth tube it grew to have as much
effect as in the first, then he solemnly called on Gottlieb and
laid before him his results, with his plans for further investi¬
gation.

The old man tapped his thin fingers on the report, read it
intently, looked up and, not wasting time in congratulations,
vomited questions:

Have you done dis? Why have you not done dat? At
what temperature is the activity of the Principle at its maxi¬
mum? Is its activity manifested on agar-solid medium?

ARROWSMITH 315

“This is my plan for new work. I think you’ll find it in¬
cludes most of your suggestions.”

“Huh!” Gottlieb ran through it and snorted, “Why have
you not planned to propagate it on dead staph? That is most
important of all.”

“Why?”

Gottlieb flew instantly to the heart of the jungle in which
Martin had struggled for many days: “Because that will show
whether you are dealing with a living virus.”

Martin was humbled, but Gottlieb beamed:

“You haf a big thing. Now do not let the Director know
about this and get enthusiastic too soon. I am glad, Mar¬
tin!”

There was that in his voice which sent Martin swanking
down the corridor, back to work — and to not sleeping.

What the X Principle was — chemical or germ — he could not
determine, but certainly the original Principle flourished. It
could be transmitted indefinitely; he determined the best tem¬
perature for it and found that it did not propagate on dead
staphylococcus. When he added a drop containing the Prin¬
ciple to a growth of staphylococcus which was a gray film on
the solid surface of agar, the drop was beautifully outlined by
bare patches, as the enemy made its attack, so that the agar
slant looked like moth-eaten beeswax. But within a fortnight
one of the knots of which Gottlieb warned him appeared.

Wary of the hundreds of bacteriologists who would rise to
slay him once his paper appeared, he sought to make sure that
his results could be confirmed. At the hospital he obtained pus
from many boils, of the arms, the legs, the back; he sought to
reduplicate his results — and failed, complete. No X Principle
appeared in any of the new boils, and sadly he went to
Gottlieb.

The old man meditated, asked a question or two, sat
hunched in his cushioned chair, and demanded:

“What kind of a carbuncle was the original one?”

“Gluteal.”

“Ah, den the X Principle may be present in the intestinal
contents. Look for it, in people with boils and without.”

Martin dashed off. In a week he had obtained the Principle
from intestinal contents and from other gluteal boils, finding
an especial amount in boils which were “healing of them¬
selves”; and he transplanted his new Principle, in a heaven of

ARROWSMITH

316

triumph, of admiration for Gottlieb. He extended his investi¬
gation to the intestinal group of organisms and discovered an
X Principle against the colon bacillus. At the same time he
gave some of the original Principle to a doctor in the Lower
Manhattan Hospital for the treatment of boils, and from him
had excited reports of cures, more excited inquiries as to what
this mystery might be.

With these new victories he went parading in to Gottlieb,
and suddenly he was being trounced:

“Oh! So! Beautiful! You let a doctor try it before you
finished your research? You want fake reports of cures to
get into the newspapers, to be telegraphed about places, and
have everybody in the world that has a pimple come tumbling
in to be cured, so you will never be able to work? You want
to be a miracle man, and not a scientist? You do not want
to complete things? You wander off monkey-skipping and
flap-doodeling with colon bacillus before you have finish with
staph — before you haf really begun your work — before you
have found what is the nature of the X Principle? Get out
of my office! You are a — a — a college president! Next I
know you will be dining with Tubbs, and get your picture
in the papers for a smart cure-vendor! ”

Martin crept out, and when he met Billy Smith in the cor¬
ridor and the little chemist twittered, “Up to something big?
Plaven’t seen you lately,” Martin answered in the tone of Doc
Vickerson’s assistant in Elk Mills:

“Oh — no — gee — I’m just grubbing along, I guess.”

As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have
watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin
watched himself, in the madness of overwork, drift toward
neurasthenia. With considerable interest he looked up the
symptoms of neurasthenia, saw one after another of them
twitch at him, and casually took the risk.

From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impos¬
sible person to live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in
which he missed things for which he reached, dropped test-
tubes, gasped at sudden footsteps behind him. Dr. Yeo’s
croaking voice became to him a fever, an insult, and he waited
with his whole body clenched, muttering, “Shut up — shut up —

ARROWS M IT H 3^7

oh, shut up!” when Yeo stopped to talk to some one outside
his door.

Then he was obsessed by the desire to spell backward all
the words which snatched at him from signs.

As he stood dragging out his shoulder on a subway strap,
he pored over the posters, seeking new words to spell back¬
ward. Some of them were remarkably agreeable: No Smoking
became a jaunty and agreeable “gnikoms on,” and Broadway
was tolerable as “yawdaorb,” but he was displeased by his
attempts on Punch, Health, Rough; while Strength, turning
into “htgnerts” was abominable.

When he had to return to his laboratory three times before
he was satisfied that he had closed the window, he sat down,
coldly, informed himself that he was on the edge, and took
council as to whether he dared go on. It was not very good
council: he was so glorified by his unfolding work that his
self could not be taken seriously.

At last Fear closed in on him.

It began with childhood’s terror of the darkness. He lay
awake dreading burglars; footsteps in the hall were a creeping
cutthroat; an unexplained scratching on the fire-escape was a
murderer with an automatic in his fist. He beheld it so clearly
that he had to spring from bed and look timorously out, and
when in the street below he did actually see a man standing

still, he was cold with panic. .

Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in
his bed, be smothered, die writhing.

He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that
knowledge did not at all keep them from dominating him.

He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cow¬
ardice to Leora. Admit that he was crouching like a . child ?
But when he had lain rigid, almost screaming, feeling the cord
of an assassin squeezing his throat, till the safe dawn brought
back a dependable world, he muttered of “insomnia and after
that, night on night, he crept into her arms and she shielded
him from the horrors, protected him from garroters, kept away

the fire. . . . ,

He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears.

agoraphobia, claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and
the rest, ending with what he asserted to be the most fool,
pretentious, witch-doctor term of the whole bloomin lo ,
namely, siderodromophobia, the fear of a railway journey. The

3i8

ARROWS MITH

first night, he was able to check against pyrophobia, for at the
vaudeville with Leora, when on the stage a dancer lighted a
brazier, he sat waiting for the theater to take fire. He looked
cautiously along the row of seats (raging at himself the while
for doing it), he estimated his chance of reaching an exit, and
became easy only when he had escaped into the street.

It was when anthropophobia set in, when he was made un¬
easy by people who walked too close to him, that, sagely view¬
ing his list and seeing how many phobias were now checked, he
permitted himself to rest.

He fled to the Vermont hills for a four-day tramp — alone,
that he might pound on the faster. He went at night, by
sleeper, and was able to make the most interesting observations
of siderodromophobia.

He lay in a lower berth, the little pillow wadded into a lump.
He was annoyed by the waving of his clothes as they trailed
from the hanger beside him, at the opening of the green cur¬
tains. The window-shade was up six inches; it left a milky
blur across which streaked yellow lights, emphatic in the
noisy darkness of his little cell. He was shivering with
anxiety. Whenever he tried to relax, he was ironed back into
apprehension. When the train stopped between stations and
from the engine came a questioning, fretful whistle, he was
aghast with certainty that something had gone wrong — a bridge
was out, a train was ahead of them; perhaps another was com¬
ing just behind them, about to smash into them at sixty miles
an hour — I

He imagined being wrecked, and he suffered more than from
the actual occurrence, for he pictured not one wreck but half
a dozen, with assorted miseries. . . . The flat wheel just be¬
neath him — surely it shouldn’t pound like that — why hadn’t
the confounded man with the hammer detected it at the last
big station? — the flat wheel cracking; the car lurching, falling,
being dragged on its side. ... A collision, a crash, the car
instantly a crumpled, horrible heap, himself pinned in the
telescoped berth, caught between seat and seat. Shrieks, death
groans, the creeping flames. . . . The car turning, falling,
plumping into a river on its side; himself trying to crawl
through a window as the water seeped about his body.
Himself standing by the wrenched car, deciding whether to
keep away and protect his sacred work or go back, rescue
people, and be killed.

ARROWS MITH

So real were the visions that he could not endure lying
here, waiting. He reached for the berth light, and could not
find the button. In agitation he tore a match-box from his
coat pocket, scratched a match, snapped on the light. He saw
himself, under the sheets, reflected in the polished wooden
ceiling of his berth like a corpse in a coffin. Hastily he
crawled out, with trousers and coat over his undergarments
(he had somehow feared to show so much trust in the train as
to put on pajamas), and with bare disgusted feet he paddled
up to the smoking compartment.

The porter was squatting on a stool, polishing an amazing
pile of shoes.

Martin longed for his encouraging companionship, and ven¬
tured, “Warm night.”

“Uh-huh,” said the porter. ,

Martin curled on the chill leather seat of the smoking com¬
partment, profoundly studying a brass wash-bowl. He was
conscious that the porter was disapproving, but he had com¬
fort in calculating that the man must make this run thrice a
week, tens of thousand of miles yearly, apparently without
being killed, and there might be a chance of their lasting till

morning. .

He smoked till his tongue was raw and till, fortified by the
calmness of the porter, he laughed at the imaginary catas¬
trophes. He staggered sleepily to his berth.

Instantly he was tense again, and he lay awake till dawn.

For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under
trees or in straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with
enough reserve of energy to support him till his experiment
should have turned from overwhelming glory into sane and
entertaining routine.

CHAPTER XXIX

When the work on the X Principle had gone on for six weeks,
the Institute staff suspected that something was occurring, and
they hinted to Martin that he needed their several assistances.
He avoided them. He did not desire to be caught in any of
the log-rolling factions, though for Terry Wickett, still in
France, and for Terry’s rough compulsion to honesty he was
sometimes lonely.

How the Director first heard that Martin was finding gold
is not known.

Dr. Tubbs was tired of being a Colonel — there were too
many Generals in New York — and for two weeks he had not
had an Idea which would revolutionize even a small part of
the world. One morning he burst in, whiskers alive, and re¬
proached Martin:

“What is this mysterious discovery you’re making, Arrow-
smith? I’ve asked Dr. Gottlieb, but he evades me; he says
you want to be sure, first. I must know about it, not only
because I take a very friendly interest in your work but be¬
cause I am, after all, your Director!”

Martin felt that his one ewe lamb was being snatched
from him but he could see no way to refuse. He brought out
his note-books, and the agar slants with their dissolved patches
of bacilli. Tubbs gasped, assaulted his whiskers, did a mo¬
ment of impressive thinking, and clamored:

“Do you mean to say you think you’ve discovered an in¬
fectious disease of bacteria, and you haven’t told me about it?
My dear boy, I don’t believe you quite realize that you may
have hit on the supreme way to kill pathogenic bacteria. . . .
And you didn’t tell me!”

“Well, sir, I wanted to make certain — ”

“I admire your caution, but you must understand, Martin,
that the basic aim of this Institution is the conquest of disease,
not making pretty scientific notes! You may have hit on one
of the discoveries of a generation; the sort of thing that Mr.

cGurk and I are looking for. ... If your results are con¬
firmed. ... I shall ask Dr. Gottlieb’s opinion.”

320

321

ARROWS MITH

He shook Martin’s hand five or six times and bustled out.
Next day he called Martin to his office, shook his hand some
more, told Pearl Robbins that they were honored to know him,
then ’led him to a mountain top and showed him all the king¬
doms of the world:

“Martin, I have some plans for you. You have been working
brilliantly, but without a complete vision of broader human¬
ity. Now the Institute is organized on the most flexible lines.
There are no set departments, but only units formed about
exceptional men like our good friend Gottlieb. If any new
man has the real right thing, we’ll provide him with every
facility, instead of letting him merely plug along doing indi¬
vidual work. I have given your results the most careful con¬
sideration, Martin; I have talked them over with Dr. Gott¬
lieb — though I must say he does not altogether share my
enthusiasm about immediate practical results. And I have
decided to submit to the Board of Trustees a plan for a
Department of Microbic Pathology, with you as head! You
will have an assistant — a real trained Ph.D— and more room
and technicians, and you will report to me directly, talk things
over with me daily, instead of with Gottlieb. You will be
relieved of all war work, by my order— though you can retain
your uniform and everything. And your salary will be, I
should think, if Mr. McGurk and the other Trustees confirm
me, ten thousand a year instead of five.

“Yes, the best room for you would be that big one on the
upper floor, to the right of the elevators. That’s vacant
now. And your office across the hall.

“And all the assistance you require. Why, my boy, you
won’t need to sit up nights using your hands in this wasteful
way, but just think things out and take up possible extensions
of the work — cover all the possible fields. We 11 extend this
to everything! We’ll have scores of physicians in hospitals
helping us and confirming our results and widening our efforts.

We might have a weekly council of all these doctors and
assistants, with you and me jointly presiding. ... If men like
Koch and Pasteur had only had such a system, how much
more scope their work might have had! Efficient umversa
cooperation— that’s the thing in science to-day— the time ot
this silly, jealous, fumbling individual research has gone by.

“My boy, we may have found the real thing another sal-
varsan! We’ll publish together! We’ll have the whole world

322

ARROWS MITH

talking! Why, I lay awake last night thinking of our mag¬
nificent opportunity! In a few months we may be curing not
only staph infections but typhoid, dysentery! Martin, as your
colleague, I do not for a moment wish to detract from the
great credit which is yours, but I must say that if you had been
more closely allied with Me you would have extended your
work to practical proofs and results long before this.”

Martin wavered back to his room, dazzled by the view of a
department of his own, assistants, a cheering world — and ten
thousand a year. But his work seemed to have been taken
from him, his own self had been taken from him; he was no
longer to be Martin, and Gottlieb’s disciple, but a Man of
Measured Merriment, Dr. Arrowsmith, Head of the Depart¬
ment of Microbic Pathology, who would wear severe collars
and make addresses and never curse.

Doubts enfeebled him. Perhaps the X Principle would
develop only in the test-tube; perhaps it had no large value
for human healing. He wanted to know — to know.

Then Rippleton Holabird burst in on him:

“Martin, my dear boy, the Director has just been telling
me about your discovery and his splendid plans for you. I
want to congratulate you with all my heart, and to welcome
you as a fellow department-head — and you so young — only
thirty- four, isn’t it? What a magnificent future! Think,
Martin” — Major Holabird discarded his dignity, sat astride
a chair “think of all you have ahead! If this work really
pans out, there’s no limit to the honors that’ll come to you,
you lucky young dog! Acclaim by scientific societies, any pro¬
fessorship you might happen to want, prizes, the biggest men
begging to consult you, a ripping place in society !

“Now listen, old boy: Perhaps you know how close I am to
Dr. Tubbs, and I see no reason why you shouldn’t come in
with us, and we three run things here to suit ourselves. Wasn’t
it simply too decent of the Director to be so eager to recognize
and help you in every way! So cordial — and so helpful. Now
you really understand him. And the three of us — Some day
we might be able to erect a superstructure of cooperative
science which would control not only McGurk but every insti¬
tute and every university scientific department in the country,
and so produce really efficient research. When Dr. Tubbs re¬
tires, I have I m speaking with the most complete confidence
—I have some reason to suppose that the Board of Trustees

ARROWSMITH 323

will consider me as his successor. Then, old boy, if this work
succeeds, you and I can do things together!

“To be ever so frank, there are very few men in our world
(think of poor old Yeo! ) who combine presentable personalities
with first-rate achievement, and if you’ll just get over some
of your abruptness and your unwillingness to appreciate big
executives and charming women (because, thank God, you do
wear your clothes well— when you take the trouble! ) why, you
and I can become the dictators of science throughout the whole
country ! ”

Martin did not think of an answer till Holabird had gone.

He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called
Success, with its demand that he give up quiet work and pa¬
rade forth to be pawed by every blind devotee and mud-spat¬
tered by every blind enemy.

He fled to Gottlieb as to the wise and tender father, and
begged to be saved from Success and Holabirds and A. De Witt
Tubbses and their hordes of address-making scientists, degree¬
hunting authors, pulpit orators, popular surgeons, valeted jour¬
nalists, sentimental merchant princes, literary politicians, titled
sportsmen, statesmenlike generals, interviewed senators, sen¬
tentious bishops.

Gottlieb was worried:

“I knew Tubbs was up to something idealistic and nasty
when he came purring to me, but I did not t’ink he would try
to turn you into a megaphone all so soon in one day! I will
gird up my loins and go oud to battle with the forces of
publicity!”

He was defeated.

“I have let you alone, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Tubbs, “but hang
it, I am the Director! And I must say that, perhaps owing to
my signal stupidity, I fail to see the horrors of enabling
Arrowsmith to cure thousands of suffering persons and to be¬
come a man of weight and esteem!”

Gottlieb took it to Ross McGurk.

“Max, I love you like a brother, but Tubbs is the Director,
and if he feels he needs this Arrowsmith (is he the thin young
fellow I see around your lab?) then I have no right to stop
him. I’ve got to back him up the same as I would the master
of one of our ships,” said McGurk.

Not till the Board of Trustees, which consisted of McGurk
himself, the president of the University of Wilmington, and

324

ARROWSMITH

three professors of science in various universities, should meet
and give approval, would Martin be a department-head.
Meantime Tubbs demanded:

“Now, Martin, you must hasten and publish your results.
Get right to it. In fact you should have done it before this.
Throw your material together as rapidly as possible and send
a note in to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medi¬
cine, to be published in their next proceedings.”

“But I’m not ready to publish! I want to have every loop¬
hole plugged up before I announce anything whatever!”

“Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no
longer an age of parochialism but of competition, in art and
science just as much as in commerce — cooperation with your
own group, but with those outside it, competition to the death!
Plug up the holes thoroughly, later, but we can’t have somebody
else stealing a march on us. Remember you have your name to
make. The way to make it is by working with me — toward the
greatest good for the greatest number.”

As Martin began his paper, thinking of resigning but giving
it up because Tubbs seemed to him at least better than the
Pickerbaughs, he had a vision of a world of little scientists,
each busy in a roofless cell. Perched on a cloud, watching
them, was the divine Tubbs, a glory of whiskers, ready to
blast any of the little men who stopped being earnest and
wasted time on speculation about anything which he had not
assigned to them. Back of their welter of coops, unseen by
the tutelary Tubbs, the lean giant figure of Gottlieb stood
sardonic on a stormy horizon.

Literary expression was not easy to Martin. He delayed
with his paper, while Tubbs became irritable and whipped
him on. The experiments had ceased; there was misery and
pen-scratching and much tearing of manuscript paper in
Martin’s particular roofless cell.

For once he had no refuge in Leora. She cried:

“Why not? Ten thousand a year would be awfully nice,
Sandy. Gee! We’ve always been so poor, and you do like
nice flats and things. And to boss your own department —
And you could consult Dr. Gottlieb just the same. He’s a
department-head, isn’t he, and yet he keeps independent of
Dr. Tubbs. Oh, I’m for it!”

And slowly, under the considerable increase in respect given
to him at Institute lunches, Martin himself was “for it.”

ARROWSMITH

325

“We could get one of those new apartments on Park Avenue.
Don’t suppose they cost more than three thousand a year,”
he meditated. “Wouldn’t be so bad to be able to entertain
people there. Not that I’d let it interfere with my work. . . .
Kind of nice.”

It was still more kind of nice, however agonizing in the
taking, to be recognized socially.

Capitola McGurk, who hitherto had not perceived him except
as an object less interesting than Gladys the Centrifuge, tele¬
phoned: “. . . Dr. Tubbs so enthusiastic and Ross and I are
so pleased. Be delighted if Mrs. Arrowsmith and you could
dine with us next Thursday at eight-thirty.”

Martin accepted the royal command.

It was his conviction that after glimpses of Angus Duer and
Rippleton Holabird he had seen luxury, and understood smart
dinner parties. Leora and he went without too much agitation
to the house of Ross McGurk, in the East Seventies, near
Fifth Avenue. The house did, from the street, seem to have
an unusual quantity of graystone gargoyles and carven lintels
and bronze grills, but it did not seem large.

Inside, the vaulted stone hallway opened up like a cathedral.
They were embarrassed by the footmen, awed by the auto¬
matic elevator, oppressed by a hallway full of vellum folios
and Italian chests and a drawing-room full of water-colors,
and reduced to rusticity by Capitola’s queenly white satin and
pearls.

There were eight or ten Persons of Importance, male and
female, looking insignificant but bearing names as familiar as
Ivory Soap.

Did one give his arm to some unknown lady and “take her
in,” Martin wondered. He rejoiced to find that one merely
straggled into the dining-room under McGurk’s amiable basso
herding.

The dining-room was gorgeous and very hideous, in stamped
leather and hysterias of gold, with collections of servants
watching one’s use of asparagus forks. Martin was seated (it
is doubtful if he ever knew that he was the guest of honor)
between Capitola McGurk and a woman of whom he could
learn only that she was the sister of a countess.

Capitola leaned toward him in her great white splendor.

“Now, Dr. Arrowsmith, just what is this you are discover¬
ing?”

326

ARROWSMITH

“Why, it’s — uh — I’m trying to figure — ”

“Dr. Tubbs tells us that you have found such wonderful
new ways of controlling disease.” Her L’s were a melody of
summer rivers, her R’s the trill of birds in the brake. “Oh,
what — what could be more beau-tiful than relieving this sad
old world of its burden of illness! But just precisely what is
it that you’re doing?”

“Why, it’s awfully early to be sure but — You see, it’s like
this. You take certain bugs like staph — ”

“Oh, how interesting science is, but how frightfully difficult
for simple people like me to grasp! But we’re all so humble.
We’re just waiting for scientists like you to make the world
secure for friendship — ”

Then Capitola gave all her attention to her other man.
Martin looked straight ahead and ate and suffered. The sister
of the countess, a sallow and stringy woman, was glowing at
him. He turned with unhappy meekness (noting that she had
one more fork than he, and wondering where he had got lost).

She blared, “You are a scientist, I am told.”

“Ye-es.”

“The trouble with scientists is that they do not understand
beauty. They are so cold.”

Rippleton Holabird would have made pretty mirth, but
Martin could only quaver, “No, I don’t think that’s true,” and
consider whether he dared drink another glass of champagne.

When they had been herded back to the drawing-room,
after masculine but achingly elaborate passings of the port,
Capitola swooped on him with white devouring wings:

“Dear Dr. Arrowsmith, I really didn’t get a chance at
dinner to ask you just exactly what you are doing. . . .Oh!
Have you seen my dear little children at the Charles Street
settlement? I’m sure ever so many of them will become the
most fascinating scientists. You must come lecture to them.”

That night he fretted to Leora, “Going to be hard to keep
up this twittering. But I suppose I’ve got to learn to enjoy
it. Oh, well, think how nice it’ll be to give some dinners of
our own, with real people, Gottlieb and everybody, when I’m
a department-head.”

Next morning Gottlieb came slowly into Martin’s room. He
stood by the window; he seemed to be avoiding Martin’s eyes.
He sighed, “Something sort of bad — perhaps not altogether
bad — has happened.”

ARROWSMITH

327

“What is it, sir? Anything I can do?”

“It does not apply to me. To you.”

Irritably Martin thought, “Is he going into all this danger-
of-rapid-success stuff again? I’m getting tired of it!”

Gottlieb ambled toward him. “It iss a pity, Martin, but
you are not the discoverer of the X Principle.”

“Wh-what — ”

“Some one else has done it.”

“They have not! I’ve searched all the literature, and except
for Twort, not one person has even hinted at anticipating —
Why, good Lord, Dr. Gottlieb, it would mean that all I’ve
done, all these weeks, has just been waste, and I’m a fool — ”

“Veil. Anyvay. D’Herelle of the Pasteur Institute has just
now published in the Comptes Iiendus, Academie des Sciences,
a report — it is your X Principle, absolute. Only he calls it
‘bacteriophage.’ So.”

“Then I’m—”

In his mind Martin finished it, “Then I’m not going to be a
department-head or famous or anything else. I’m back in the
gutter.” All strength went out of him and all purpose, and the
light of creation faded to dirty gray.

“Now of course,” said Gottlieb, “you could claim to be co¬
discoverer and spend the rest of your life fighting to get recog¬
nized. Or you could forget it, and write a nice letter congratu¬
lating D’Herelle, and go back to work.”

Martin mourned, “Oh, I’ll go back to work. Nothing else
to do. I guess Tubbs’ll chuck the new department now. I’ll
have time to really finish my research — maybe I’ve got some
points that D’Herelle hasn’t hit on — and I’ll publish it to cor¬
roborate him. . . . Damn him! . . . Where is his report?
. . . I suppose you’re glad that I’m saved from being a
Holabird.”

“I ought to be. It is a sin against my religion that I am
not. But I am getting old. And you are my friend. I am
sorry you are not to have the fun of being pretentious and
successful — for a while. . . . Martin, it iss nice that you will
corroborate D’Herelle. That is science: to work and not to
care — too much — if somebody else gets the credit. . . . Shall
I tell Tubbs about D’Herelle’s priority, or will you?”

Gottlieb straggled away, looking back a little sadly.

Tubbs came in to wail, “If you had only published earlier,
as I told you, Dr. Arrowsmith! You have really put me in a

ARROWSMITH

328

most embarrassing position before the Board of Trustees. Of
course there can be no question now of a new department.”

“Yes,” said Martin vacantly.

He carefully filed away the beginnings of his paper and
turned to his bench. He stared at a shining flask till it fasci¬
nated him like a crystal ball. He pondered:

“Wouldn’t have been so bad if Tubbs had let me alone.
Damn these old men, damn these Men of Measured Merri¬
ment, these Important Men that come and offer you honors.
Money. Decorations. Titles. Want to make you windy
with authority. Honors! If you get ’em, you become pom¬
pous, and then when you’re used to ’em, if you lose ’em you
feel foolish.

“So I’m not going to be rich. Leora, poor kid, she won’t
have her new dresses and flat and everything. We — Won’t
be so much fun in the lil old flat, now. Oh, quit whining!

“I wish Terry were here.

“I love that man Gottlieb. He might have gloated —

“Bacteriophage, the Frenchman calls it. Too long. Better
just call it phage . Even got to take his name for it, for my
own X Principle! Well, I had a lot of fun, working all those
nights. Working — ”

He was coming out of his trance. He imagined the flask
filled with staph-clouded broth. He plodded into Gottlieb’s
office to secure the journal containing D’Herelle’s report, and
read it minutely, enthusiastically.

“There’s a man, there’s a scientist!” he chuckled.

On his way home he was planning to experiment on the
Shiga dysentery bacillus with phage (as henceforth he called
the X Principle), planning to volley questions and criticisms at
D’Herelle, hoping that Tubbs would not discharge him for a
while, and expanding with relief that he would not have to do
his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be lewd
and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and
weighty.

He grinned, “Gosh, I’ll bet Tubbs was disappointed! He’d
figured on signing all my papers with me and getting the
credit. Now for this Shiga experiment — Poor Lee, she’ll
have to get used to my working nights, I guess.”

Leora kept to herself what she felt about it — or at least
most of what she felt.

CHAPTER XXX

For a year broken only by Terry Wickett’s return after the
Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence,
Martin was in a grind of drudgery. Week on week he toiled
at complicated phage experiments. His work — his hands, his
technique — became more adept, and his days more steady, less
fretful.

He returned to his evening studying. He went from mathe¬
matics into physical chemistry; began to understand the mass
action law; became as sarcastic as Terry about what he called
the “bedside manner” of Tubbs and Holabird; read much
French and German ; went canoeing on the Hudson on Sunday
afternoons; and had a bawdy party with Leora and Terry to
celebrate the day when the Institute was purified by the sale
of Holabird’s pride, Gladys the Centrifuge. .

He suspected that Dr. Tubbs, now magnificent with the
ribbon of the Legion of Honor, had retained him in the Insti¬
tute only because of Gottlieb’s intervention. But it may be
that Tubbs and Holabird hoped he would again blunder into
publicity-bringing miracles, for they were both polite to him
at lunch— polite and wistfully rebuking, _ and full of meaty
remarks about publishing one’s discoveries early instead of

dawdling. . . . ,

It was more than a year after Martin’s anticipation by
D’Herelle when Tubbs appeared in the laboratory with sug¬
gestions:

“I’ve been thinking, Arrowsmith,” said Tubbs.

He looked it. . .

“D’Herelle’s discovery hasn’t aroused the popular interest
I thought it would. If he’d only been here with us, I’d have
seen to it that he got the proper attention. Practically no
newspaper comment at all. Perhaps we. can still do some¬
thing As I understand it, you’ve been going along with what
Dr. Gottlieb would call ‘fundamental research.’ . I think it
may now be time for you to use phage in practical healing.

329

33o ARROWSMITH

I want you to experiment with phage in pneumonia, plague,
perhaps typhoid, and when your experiments get going, make
some practical tests in collaboration with the hospitals.
Enough of all this mere frittering and vanity. Let’s really
cure somebody!”

Martin was not free from a fear of dismissal if he refused
to obey. And he was touched as Tubbs went on:

“Arrowsmith, I suspect you sometimes feel I lack a sense
of scientific precision when I insist on practical results. I —
Somehow I don’t see the really noble and transforming results
coming out of this Institute that we ought to be getting, with
our facilities. I’d like to do something big, my boy, something
fine for poor humanity, before I pass on. Can’t you give it to
me? Go cure the plague!”

For once Tubbs was a tired smile and not an earnestness
of whiskers.

That day, concealing from Gottlieb his abandonment of the
quest for the fundamental nature of phage, Martin set about
fighting pneumonia, before attacking the Black Death. And
when Gottlieb learned of it, he was absorbed in certain trou¬
bles of his own.

Martin cured rabbits of pleuro-pneumonia by the injection
of phage, and by feeding them with it he prevented the spread
of pneumonia. He found that phage-produced immunity could
be as infectious as a disease.

He was pleased with himself, and expected pleasure from
Tubbs, but for weeks Tubbs did not heed him. He was off
On a new enthusiasm, the most virulent of his whole life: he
was organizing the League of Cultural Agencies.

He was going to standardize and coordinate all mental ac¬
tivities in America, by the creation of a bureau which should
direct and pat and gently rebuke and generally encourage
chemistry and batik-making, poetry and Arctic exploration,
animal husbandry and Bible study, negro spirituals and busi¬
ness-letter writing. He was suddenly in conference with con¬
ductors of symphony orchestras, directors of art-schools,
owners of itinerant Chautauquas, liberal governors, ex¬
clergymen who wrote tasty philosophy for newspaper syndi¬
cates, in fact all the proprietors of American intellectuality —
particularly including a millionaire named Minnigen who had
recently been elevating the artistic standards of the motion
pictures.

ARROWS MITH

33*

Tubbs was all over the Institute inviting the researchers to
join him in the League of Cultural Agencies with its fascinat¬
ing committee-meetings and dinners. Most of them grunted,
“The Old Man is erupting again,” and forgot him, but one
ex-major went out every evening to confer with serious ladies
who wore distinguished frocks, who sobbed over “the loss of
spiritual and intellectual horse-power through lack of coordi¬
nation,” and who went home in limousines.

There were rumors. Dr. Billy Smith whispered that he had
gone in to see Tubbs and heard McGurk shouting at him,
“Your job is to run this shop and not work for that land¬
stealing, four-flushing, play-producing son of evil, Pete Min-
nigen!”

The morning after, when Martin ambled to his laboratory,
he discovered a gasping, a muttering, a shaking in the cor¬
ridors, and incredulously he heard:

“Tubbs has resigned!”

“No!”

“They say he’s gone to his League of Cultural Agencies.
This fellow Minnigen has given the League a scad of money,
and Tubbs is to get twice the salary he had here!”

Instantly, for all but the zealots like Gottlieb, Terry, Mar¬
tin, and the bio-physics assistant, research was halted. There
was a surging of factions, a benevolent and winning buzz of
scientists who desired to be the new Director of the Insti¬
tute.

Rippleton Holabird, Yeo the carpenter-like biologist, Gil¬
lingham the joky chief in bio-physics, Aaron Sholtheis the
neat Russian Jewish High Church Episcopalian, all of them
went about with expressions of modest willingness. They
were affectionate with everybody they met in the corridors,
however violent they were in private discussions. Added to
them were no few outsiders, professors and researchers in
other institutes, who found it necessary to come and confer
about rather undefined matters with Ross McGurk.

Terry remarked to Martin, “Probably Pearl Robbins and
your gargon are pitching horseshoes for the Directorship. My
gargon ain’t — the only reason, though, is because I’ve just
murdered him. At that, I think Pearl would be the best

332 ARROWS MIT H

choice. She’s been Tubbs’s secretary so long that she’s learned
all his ignorance about scientific technique.”

Rippleton Holabird was the most unctuous of the office-
seekers, and the most hungry. The war over, he missed his
uniform and his authority. He urged Martin: _ .

“You know how I’ve always believed in your genius, Martin,
and I know how dear old Gottlieb believes in you. If you
would get Gottlieb to back me, to talk to McGurk — Of
course in taking the Directorship I would be making a sacri¬
fice, because I’d have to give up my research, but I’d be
willing because I feel, really, that somebody with a Tradition
ought to carry on the control. Tubbs is backing me, and if
Gottlieb did— I’d see that it was to Gottlieb’s advantage.
I’d give him a lot more floor-space!”

Through the Institute it was vaguely known that Capitola
was advocating the election of Holabird as “the only scientist
here who is also a gentleman.” She was seen sailing down
corridors, a frigate, with Holabird a sloop in her wake.

But while Holabird beamed, Nicholas Yeo looked secret
and satisfied.

The whole Institute fluttered on the afternoon when the
Board of Trustees met in the Hall, for the election of a Di¬
rector. They were turned from investigators into boarding-
school girls. The Board debated, or did something annoying,
for draining hours.

At four, Terry Wickett hastened to Martin with, “Say,
Slim, I’ve got a straight tip that They’ve elected Silva, dean
of the Winnemac medical school. That’s your shop, isn’t it?
Wha’s like?”

“He’s a fine old — - No! He and Gottlieb hate each other.
Lord! Gottlieb ’ll resign, and I’ll have to get out. Just when
my work’s going nice!”

At five, past doors made of attentive eyes, the Board of
Trustees marched to the laboratory of Max Gottlieb.

Holabird was heard saying bravely, “Of course with me, I
wouldn’t give my research up for any administrative job.”
And Pearl Robbins informed Terry, “Yes, it’s true — Mr. Mc¬
Gurk himself just told me — the Board has elected Dr. Gott¬
lieb the new Director.”

“Then they’re fools,” said Terry. “He’ll refuse it, with
wilence. ‘Dot dey should ask me to go monkey-skipping mit
committee meetings!’ Fat chance!”

333

ARROWSMITH

When the Board had gone, Martin and Terry flooded into
Gottlieb’s laboratory and found the old man standing by his
bench more erect than they had seen him for years.

“Is?it true — they want you to be Director?” panted Martin.

“Yes, they have asked me.”

“But you’ll refuse? You won’t let ’em gum up your work.

“Veil. ... I said my real work must go on. They consent
I should appoint an Assistant Director to do the detail. You
see— Of course nothing must interfere with my immunology,
but dis gives me the chance to do big t’ings and make a free
scientific institute for all you boys. And those fools at Win-
nemac that laughed at my idea of a real medical school now
maybe they will see— Do you know who was my rival tor
Director — do you know who it was, Martin? It was that man

Silva! Ha!” . . „

In the corridor Terry groaned, “Requiescat m pace.

To the dinner in Gottlieb’s honor (the only dinner that ever
was riven in Gottlieb’s honor) there came not only the men
of impressive but easy affairs who attend all dinners of honor,
but the few scientists whom Gottlieb admired

He appeared late, rather shaky, escorted by Martin. When
he reached the speakers’ table, the guests rose to him, shout¬
ing He peered at them, he tried to speak, he held out his
long arms as if to take them all in, and sank down sobbing
There were cables from Europe; ardent letters from Tubbs
and Dean Silva bewailing their inability to be present; tele¬
grams from college presidents; and all of these were read to

adButnCapfto!aUmurmured, “Just the same, we shall miss dear
Dr. Tubbs. He was so forward-looking. Dont play with

y°So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Destitute of
Biology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.

Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business.
As Assistant Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis the
epidemiologist, the Yonkers churchman and dahlia-fancier.

ARROWSMITH

334

Gottlieb explained to Martin that, though of course Sholtheis
was a fool, yet he was the only man in sight who combined
at least a little scientific ability with a willingness to endure
the routine and pomposity and compromises of executive
work.

By continuing his ancient sneers at all bustling managers,
Gottlieb obviously felt that he excused himself for having
become a manager.

He could not confine his official work to an hour a day.
There were too many conferences, too many distinguished
callers, too many papers which needed his signature. He was
dragged into dinner-parties; and the long, vague, palavering
luncheons to which a Director has to go, and the telephoning
to straighten out the dates of these tortures, took nervous
hours. Each day his executive duties crawled into two hours
or three or four, and he raged, he became muddled by com¬
plications of personnel and economy, he was ever more auto¬
cratic, more testy; and the loving colleagues of the Institute,
who had been soothed or bullied into surface peace by Tubbs,
now jangled openly.

While he was supposed to radiate benevolence from the
office recently occupied by Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Gottlieb
clung to his own laboratory and to his narrow office as a cat
clings to its cushion under a table. Once or twice he tried to
sit and look impressive in the office of the Director, but he
fled from that large clean vacuity and from Miss Robbins’s
snapping typewriter to his own den that smelled not of for¬
ward-looking virtue but only of cigarettes and old papers.

To McGurk, as to every scientific institution, came hundreds
of farmers and practical nurses and suburban butchers who
had paid large fares from Oklahoma or Oregon to get recogni¬
tion for the unquestionable cures which they had discovered:
oil of Mississippi catfish which saved every case of tuber¬
culosis, arsenic pastes guaranteed to cure all cancers. They
came with letters and photographs amid the frayed clean linen
in their shabby suit-cases — at any opportunity they would
stoop over their bags and hopefully bring out testimonials
from their Pastors ; they begged for a chance to heal humanity,
and for themselves only enough money to send The Girl to
musical conservatory. So certain, so black-crapely beseeching
were they that no reception-clerk could be trained to keep
them all out.

ARROWSMITH

335

Gottlieb found them seeping into his office. He was sorry
for them. They did take his working hours, they did scratch
his belief that he was hard-hearted, but they implored him
with such wretched timorousness that he could not get rid of
them without making promises, and admitting afterward that
to have been more cruel would have been less cruel.

It was the Important People to whom he was rude.

The Directorship devoured enough time and peace to pre¬
vent Gottlieb from going on with the ever more recondite prob¬
lems of his inquiry into the nature of specificity, and his in¬
quiry prevented him from giving enough attention to the In¬
stitute to keep it from falling to pieces. He depended on
Sholtheis, passed decisions on to him, but Sholtheis, since in
any case Gottlieb would get all the credit for a successful
Directorship, kept up his own scientific work and passed the
decisions to Miss Pearl Robbins, so that the actual Director
was the handsome and jealous Pearl.

There was no craftier or crookeder Director in the habitable
world. Pearl enjoyed it. She so warmly and modestly as¬
sured Ross McGurk of the merits of Gottlieb and of her
timorous devotion to him, she so purred to the flattery of Rip-
pleton Holabird, she so blandly answered the hoarse hostility
of Terry Wickett by keeping him from getting materials for
his work, that the Institute reeled with intrigue.

Yeo was not speaking to Sholtheis. Terry threatened Hola¬
bird to “paste him one.” Gottlieb constantly asked Martin for
advice, and never took it. Joust, the vulgar but competent bio¬
physicist, lacking the affection which kept Martin and Terry
from reproaching the old man, told Gottlieb that he was a
“rotten Director and ought to quit,” and was straightway dis¬
charged and replaced by a muffin.

Max Gottlieb had ever discoursed to Martin of “the jests
of the gods.” Among these jests Martin had never beheld one
so pungent as this whereby the pretentiousness and fussy un¬
imaginativeness which he had detested in Tubbs should have
made him a good manager, while the genius of Gottlieb should
have made him a feeble tyrant; the jest that the one thing
worse than a too managed and standardized institution should
be one that was not managed and standardized at all. He
would once have denied it with violence, but nightly now he
prayed for Tubbs’s return.

If the business of the Institute was not more complicated

336 ARROWSMITH

thereby, certainly its placidity was the more disturbed by the
appearance of Gustaf Sondelius, who had just returned from
a study of sleeping sickness in Africa and who noisily took
one of the guest laboratories.

Gustaf Sondelius, the soldier of preventive medicine whose
lecture had sent Martin from Wheatsylvania to Nautilus had
remained in his gallery of heroes as possessing a little of Gott-
lieb’s perception, something of Dad Silva s steady kindliness,
something of Terry’s tough honesty though none of his scorn
of amenities, and with these a spicy, dripping richness alto¬
gether his own. It is true that Sondelius did not remember
Martin. Since their evening in Minneapolis he had drunk and
debated and flamboyantly ridden to obscure but vinuous des¬
tinations with too many people. But he was made^ to re¬
member, and in a week Sondelius and Terry and Martin were
to be seen tramping and dining, or full of topics and gin at
Martin’s flat.

Sondelius’s wild flaxen hair was almost gray, but he had
the same bull shoulders, the same wide brow, and the same
tornado of plans to make the world aseptic, without neglect¬
ing to enjoy a few of the septic things before they should pass

away. .

His purpose was, after finishing his sleeping sickness report,

to found a school of tropical medicine in New York.

He besieged McGurk and the wealthy Mr. Minnigen who
was Tubbs’s new patron, and in and out of season he besieged
Gottlieb.

He adored Gottlieb and made noises about it. Gottlieb
admired his courage and his hatred of commercialism, but his
presence Gottlieb could not endure. He was flustered by Son¬
delius’s hilarity, his compliments, his bounding optimism, his
inaccuracy, his boasting, his oppressive bigness. It may be
that Gottlieb resented the fact that though Sondelius was only
eleven years younger — fifty-eight to Gottlieb’s sixty-nine he
seemed thirty years younger, half a century gayer.

When Sondelius perceived this grudgingness he tried to over¬
come it by being more noisy and complimentary and enthu¬
siastic than ever. On Gottlieb’s birthday he gave him a shock¬
ing smoking-jacket of cherry and mauve velvet, and when he
called at Gottlieb’s flat, which was often, Gottlieb had to put
on the ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius assaulted
him with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocre

ARROWSMITH 337

musicians. . . . That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decora¬
tive dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.

Martin turned to Sondelius for courage as he turned to Terry
for concentration. Courage and concentration were needed, in
these days of an Institute gone insane, if a man was to do his
work.

And Martin was doing it.

After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference
with Leora about the danger of handling the germs, he had
gone on to bubonic plague, to the possibilities of preventing it
and curing it with phage.

To have heard him asking Sondelius about his experience
in plague epidemics, one would have believed that Martin
found the Black Death delightful. To have beheld him in¬
fecting lean snaky rats with the horror, all the while clucking
to them and calling them pet names, one would have known
him mad.

He found that rats fed with phage failed to come down with
plague; that after phage-feeding, Bacillus pestis disappeared
from carrier rats which, without themselves being killed
thereby, harbored and spread chronic plague; and that,
finally, he could cure the disease. He was as absorbed and
happy and nervous as in the first days of the X Principle.
He worked all night. ... At the microscope, under a lone
light, fishing out with a glass pipette drawn fine as a hair one

single plague bacillus. _ ,

To protect himself from infection by the rat-fleas he wore,
while he worked with the animals, rubber gloves, high leather
boots, straps about his sleeves. These precautions thrilled
him and to the others at McGurk they had something oi the
esoteric magic of the alchemists. He became a bit of a hero
and a good deal of a butt. No more than hearty business
men in offices or fussy old men in villages are researchers ree
from the tedious vice of jovial commenting. The chemists
and biologists called him “The Pest,” refused to come to his
room, and pretended to avoid him in the corridors..

As he went fluently on from experiment to experiment, as
the drama of science obsessed him, he thought very well of
himself and found himself taken seriously by the others. He

ARRO WSMITH

338

published one cautious paper on phage in plague, which was
mentioned in numerous scientific journals. Even the harassed
Gottlieb was commendatory, though he could give but little
attention and no help. But Terry Wickett remained altogether
cool. He showed for Martin’s somewhat brilliant work only
enough enthusiasm to indicate that he was not jealous; he
kept poking in to ask whether, with his new experimentation,
Martin was continuing his quest for the fundamental nature
of all phage, and his study of physical chemistry.

Then Martin had such an assistant as has rarely been
known, and that assistant was Gustaf Sondelius.

Sondelius was discouraged regarding his school of tropical
medicine. He was looking for new trouble. He had been
through several epidemics, and he viewed plague with affec¬
tionate hatred. When he understood Martin’s work he
gloated, “Hey, Yesus! Maybe you got the t’ing that will be
better than Yersin or Haffkine or anybody! Maybe you cure
all the world of plague — the poor devils in India — millions
of them. Let me in!”

He became Martin’s collaborator; unpaid, tireless, not very
skilful, valuable in his buoyancy. As well as Martin he loved
irregularity; by principle he never had his meals at the same
hours two days in succession, and by choice he worked all
night and made poetry, rather bad poetry, at dawn.

Martin had always been the lone prowler. Possibly the
thing he most liked in Leora was her singular ability to be
cheerfully non-existent even when she was present. At first
he was annoyed by Sondelius’s disturbing presence, however
interesting he found his fervors about plague-bearing rats
(whom Sondelius hated not at all but whom, with loving zeal,
he had slaughtered by the million, with a romantic absorption
in traps and poison gas). But the Sondelius who was raucous
in conversation could be almost silent at work. He knew
exactly how to hold the animals while Martin did intra¬
pleural injections; he made cultures of Bacillus pestis; when
Martin’s technician had gone home at but a little after mid¬
night (the gargon liked Martin and thought well enough of
science, but he was prejudiced in favor of six hours daily
sleep and sometimes seeing his wife and children in Harlem),
then Sondelius cheerfully sterilized glassware and needles, and
lumbered up to the animal house to bring down victims.

The change whereby Sondelius was turned from Martin’s

ARROWSMITH

339

master to his slave was so unconscious, and Sondelius, for all
his Pickerbaughian love of sensationalism, cared so little about
mastery or credit, that neither of them considered that there
had been a change. They borrowed cigarettes from each
other; they went out at the most improbable hours to have
flap-jacks and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they
handled test-tubes charged with death.

CHAPTER XXXI

From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars,
crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark,
creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas
down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot
yellow rivers, into an American missionary compound creep¬
ing, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was
black and stilled with plague.

In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke
boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of
the rats.

Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone
mad. They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the
guard, springing up as though (the guard said merrily) they
were trying to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked
at them, but they did not move.

Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.

Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat
steamed off to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the
way; there was no reason why at Marseilles it should not lie
next to a tramp steamer, nor why that steamer, pitching down
to Montevideo with nothing more sensational than a discussion
between the supercargo and the second officer in the matter of
a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S. Pendown Castle,
bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its present
cargo of lumber.

On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after
him the messroom steward on the Pendcmn Castle died of what
the skipper called influenza. A greater trouble was the num¬
ber of rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered
up to the food-stores, then into the forecastle, and for no
reason perceptible died on the open decks. They danced
comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and
ruffled.

340

ARROWSMITH 341

So the Pendown Castle came to Blackwater, the capital and
port of St. Hubert.

It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St.
Hubert supports a hundred thousand people — English planters
and clerks, Hindu road-makers, negro cane-hands, Chinese
merchants. There is history along its sands and peaks. Here
the buccaneers careened their ships; here the Marquess of
Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks
and bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.

Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame
de Merlemont, and dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves
whom he had often relished to lash came on him shaving,
and straightway the lather was fantastically smeared with
blood.

To-day, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges
and plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas
and rubber trees and jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches
and tin chapels, colored washerwomen busy at the hollows in
the roots of silk-cotton trees, steamy heat and royal palms and
the immortelle that fills the valleys with crimson; to-day it is
all splendor and tourist dullness and cabled cane-quotations,
against the unsparing sun.

Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster
houses and incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red
hibiscus and balconied stores whose dark depths open without
barrier from the stifling streets, has the harbor to one side
and a swamp to the other. But behind it are the Penrith
Hills, on whose wholesome and palm-softened heights is Gov¬
ernment House, looking to the winking sails.

Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of
St. Hubert, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.

Sir Robert Fairlamb was an excellent fellow, a teller of
messroom stories, one who in a heathen day never smoked till
the port had gone seven times round ; but he was an execrable
governor and a worried governor. The man whose social rank
was next to his own — the Hon. Cecil Eric George Twyford,
a lean, active, high-nosed despot who owned and knew rod by
snake-writhing rod some ten thousand acres of cane in St.
Swithin’s Parish— Twyford said that His Excellency was a
“potty and snoring fool,” and versions of the opinion came
not too slowly to Fairlamb. Then, to destroy him complete,
the House of Assembly, which is the St. Hubert legislature,

342

ARROWSMITH

was riven by the feud of Kellett the Red Leg and George Wil¬
liam Vertigan.

The Red Legs were a tribe of Scotch-Irish poor whites who
had come to St. Hubert as indentured servants two hundred
years before. Most of them were still fishermen and planta¬
tion-foremen, but one of them, Kellett, a man small-mouthed
and angry and industrious, had risen from office-boy to owner
of a shipping company, and while his father still spread his
nets on the beach at Point Carib, Kellett was the scourge of
the House of Assembly and a hound for economy — particu¬
larly any economy which would annoy his fellow legislator,
George William Vertigan.

George William, who was sometimes known as “Old Jeo
Wm” and sometimes as “The King of the Ice House” (that
enticing and ruinous bar), had been born behind a Little
Bethel in Lancashire. He owned The Blue Bazaar, the hugest
stores in St. Hubert; he caused tobacco to be smuggled into
Venezuela; he was as full of song and incaution and rum as
Kellett the Red Leg was full of figures and envy and decency.

Between them, Kellett and George William split the House
of Assembly. There could be, to a respectable person, no
question as to their merits: Kellett the just and earnest man
of domesticity whose rise was an inspiration to youth; George
William the gambler, the lusher, the smuggler, the liar, the
seller of shoddy cottons, a person whose only excellence was
his cheap good nature.

Kellett’s first triumph in economy was to pass an ordinance
removing the melancholy Cockney (a player of oboes) who
was the official rat-catcher of St. Hubert.

George William Vertigan insisted in debate, and afterward
privily to Sir Robert Fairlamb, that rats destroy food and
perhaps spread disease, and His Excellency must veto the
bill. Sir Robert was troubled. He called in The Surgeon
General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones (but he preferred to be
called Mister, not Doctor).

Dr. Inchcape Jones was a thin, tall, fretful, youngish man,
without bowels. He had come out from Home only two years
before, and he wanted to go back Home, to that particular
part of Home represented by tennis-teas in Surrey. He re¬
marked to Sir Robert that rats and their ever faithful fleas
do carry diseases — plague and infectious jaundice and rat-bite
fever and possibly leprosy — but these diseases did not and

ARROW SMITH

343

therefore could not exist in St. Hubert, except for leprosy,
which was a natural punishment of outlandish Native Races.
In fact, noted Inchcape Jones, nothing did exist in St. Hubert
except malaria, dengue, and a general beastly dullness, and if
Red Legs like Kellett longed to die of plague and rat-bite
fever, why should decent people object?

So by the sovereign power of the House of Assembly of St.
Hubert, and of His Excellency the Governor, the Cockney
rat-catcher and his jiggling young colored assistant were com¬
manded to cease to exist. The rat-catcher became a chauffeur.
He drove Canadian and American tourists, who stopped over
at St. Hubert for a day or two between Barbados and Trini¬
dad, along such hill-trails as he considered most easy to achieve
with a second-hand motor, and gave them misinformation re¬
garding the flowers. The rat-catcher’s assistant became a
respectable smuggler and leader of a Wesleyan choir. And
as for the rats themselves, they flourished, they were glad in
the land, and each female produced from ten to two hundred
offspring every year.

They were not often seen by day. “The rats aren’t increas¬
ing; the cats kill ’em,” said Kellett the Red Leg. But by
darkness they gamboled in the warehouses and in and out of
the schooners along the quay. They ventured countryward,
and lent their fleas to a species of ground squirrels which
were plentiful about the village of Carib.

A year and a half after the removal of the rat-catcher, when
the Pendown Castle came in from Montevideo and moored
by the Councillor Pier, it was observed by ten thousand glinty
small eyes among the piles.

As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected
with the deaths from what the skipper had called influenza,
the crew of the Pendown Castle put rat-shields on the mooring
hawsers, but they did not take up the gang-plank at night,
and now and then a rat slithered ashore to find among its kin
in Blackwater more unctuous fare than hardwood lumber.
The Pendown sailed amiably for home, and from Avonmouth
came to Surgeon General Inchcape Jones a cable announcing
that the ship was held, that others of the crew had died . . .
and died of plague.

In the curt cablegram the word seemed written in bone-
scorching fire.

Two days before the cable came, a Blackwater lighterman

344

ARROWSMITH

had been smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with
delirium and buboes. Inchcape Jones said that it could not
be plague, because there never was plague in St. Hubert. His
confrere, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it couldn’t be plague,
but it damn’ well w.as plague.

Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical
officer of St. Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic
reaches of St. Swithin, where he belonged, but snooped all
over the island, annoying Inchcape Jones. He was an M.B.
of Edinburgh; he had served in the African bush; he had had
blackwater fever and cholera and most other reasonable afflic¬
tions; and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red
blood corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones.
He was not a nice man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at
tennis, with a nasty, unsporting serve — the sort of serve you’d
expect from an American.

And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied
himself as an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to
have him creeping about the docks, catching rats, making cul¬
tures from the bellies of their fleas, and barging in — sandy-
headed and red-faced, thin and unpleasant — to insist that they
bore plague.

“My dear fellow, there’s always some Bacillus pestis among
rats,” said Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.

When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded
that it be openly admitted that the plague had come to St.
Hubert.

“Even if it was plague, which is not certain,” said Inchcape
Jones, “there’s no reason to cause a row and frighten every¬
body. It was a sporadic case. There won’t be any more.”

There was more, immediately. In a week three other water¬
front workers and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with
something which, even Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was un¬
comfortably like the description of plague in “Manson’s
Tropical Diseases”: “a prodromal stage characterized by de¬
pression, anorexia, aching of the limbs,” then the fever, the
vertigo, the haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes,
the buboes in the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inch¬
cape Jones ceased being chattery and ever so jolly about
picnics, and became almost as grim as Stokes. But publicly
he still hoped and denied, and St. Hubert did not know . . .
did not know.

ARRO WSMITH

345

To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the
rather dull and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and
restaurant called the Ice House.

It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping Agency and the
shop where the Chinaman who is supposed to be a graduate of
Oxford sells carved tortoise, and cocoanuts in the horrible like¬
ness of a head shrunken by headhunters. Except for the bal¬
cony, where one lunches and looks down on squatting breech-
clouted Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English chil¬
dren at games in the savannah, all of the Ice House is a large
and dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of
Moorish grills, a touch of gilt on white-painted walls, a heavy,
amazingly long mahogany bar, slot machines, and marbie-
topped tables beyond your own.

Here, at the cocktail -hour, are all the bloodless, sun-helmeted
white rulers of St. Hubert who haven’t quite the caste to belong
to the Devonshire Club: the shipping-office clerks, the mer¬
chants who have no grandfathers, the secretaries to the Inch-
cape Joneses, the Italians and Portuguese who smuggle into
Venezuela

Calmed by rum swizzles, those tart and commanding aperitifs
which are made in their deadly perfection only by the twirling
swizzle-sticks of the darkies at the Ice House bar, the exiles
become peaceful, and have another swizzle, and grow certain
again (as for twenty-four hAurs, since the last cocktail-hour,
they have not been certain) That next year they will go Home.
Yes, they will taper off, take exercise in the dawn coolness, stop
drinking, become strong and successful, and go Home . . . the
Lotus Eaters, tears in their eyes when in the dimness of the
Ice House they think of Piccadilly or the heights of Queb&c, of
Indiana or Catalonia or the clogs of Lancashire. . . . They
never go Home. But always they have new reassuring cock¬
tail-hours at the Ice House, until they die, and the other lost
men come to their funerals and whisper one to another that

they are going Home. .

Now of the Ice House, George William Vertigan, owner of
the Blue Bazaar, was unchallenged monarch. He was a thick,
ruddy man, the sort of Englishman one sees in the Midlands,
the sort that is either very Non-Conformist or very alcoholic,
and George William was not Non-Conformist. Each day from

346 ARROWSMITH

five to seven he was tilted against the bar, never drunk, never
altogether sober, always full of melody and kindliness, the
one man who did not long for Home, because outside the Ice

House he remembered no home.

When it was whispered that a man had died of something
which might be plague, George William announced to his
court that if it were true, it would serve Kellett the Red Leg
jolly well right. But every one knew that the West Indian
climate prevented plague.

The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were reas-
sured.

It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice
House a rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.

No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or
the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where
the negroes gather after working hours, but they heard, almost
without hearing, of this death— and this— and another. No one
liked to shake hands with his oldest friend; every one fled from
every one else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and
through the island galloped the Panic, which is more murderous
than its brother, the Plague.

Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inch-
cape Jones vomited feeble proclamations on the inadvisability
of too-large public gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire
about Haffkine’s prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he
protested, “Honestly, there’s only been a few deaths, and I
think it’s all passed over. As for these suggestions of Stokes
that we burn the village of Carib, merely because they’ve had
several cases — why, it’s barbarous! And it’s been conveyed to
me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants
would take the strongest measures against the administration.
It would ruin the tourist and export business.”

But Stokes of St. Swithin’s secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gott¬
lieb, Director of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was
ready to flare up and consume all the West Indies, and would
Dr. Gottlieb do something about it?

CHAPTER XXXn

There may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb
a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind;
there may have been mere resentment of the doctors who con¬
sidered his science of value only as it was handy to advertising
their business of healing; there may have been the obscure
and passionate and unscrupulous demand of genius for privacy.
Certainly he who had lived to study the methods of immunizing
mankind against disease had little interest in actually using
those methods. He was like a fabulous painter, so contemptu¬
ous of popular taste that after a lifetime of creation he should
destroy everything he had done, lest it be marred and mocked
by the dull eyes of the crowd.

The letter from Dr. Stokes was not his only intimation that
plague was striding through St. Hubert, that to-morrow it
might be leaping to Barbados, to the Virgin Islands ... to
New York. Ross McGurk was an emperor of the new era,
better served than any cloistered satrap of old. His skippers
looked in at a hundred ports; his railroads penetrated jungles;
his correspondents whispered to him of the next election in Co¬
lombia, of the Cuban cane-crop, of what Sir Robert Fairlamb
had said to Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones on his bungalow porch.
Ross McGurk, and after him Max Gottlieb, knew better than
did the Lotus Eaters of the Ice House how much plague there
was in St. Hubert.

Yet Gottlieb did not move, but pondered the unknown chemi¬
cal structure of antibodies, interrupted by questions as to
whether Pearl Robbins had enough pencils, whether it would
be quite all right for Dr. Holabird to receive the Lettish
scientific mission this afternoon, so that Dr. Sholtheis might
attend the Anglican Conference on the Reservation of the Host.

He was assailed by inquirers: public health officials, one Dr.
Almus Pickerbaugh, a congressman who was said to be popular
in Washington, Gustaf Sondelius, and a Martin Arrowsmith

347

348 ARROWSMITH

who could not (whether because he was too big or too small)
quite attain Gottlieb’s concentrated indifference.

It was rumored that Arrowsmith of McGurk had something
which might eradicate plague. Letters demanded of Gottlieb,
“Can you stand by, with the stuff of salvation in your hands,
and watch thousands of these unfortunate people dying in St.
Hubert, and what is more, are you going to let the dreaded
plague gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere? My dear
man, this is the time to come out of your scientific reverie and
act! ”

Then Ross McGurk, over a comfortable steak, hinted, not too
diffidently, that this was the opportunity for the Institute to
acquire world-fame.

Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands
of the public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb’s own imagination
aroused enough to visualize the far-off misery of the blacks
in the canefields, he summoned Martin and remarked:

“It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Man¬
churia and bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I
could trust you, Martin, to use the phage with only half your
patients and keep the others as controls, under normal hygienic
conditions but without the phage, then you could make an
absolute determination of its value, as complete as what we
have of mosquito transmission of yellow fever, and then I
would send you down to St. Hubert. What do you t’ink?”

Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test
conditions; he would determine forever the value of phage by
the contrast between patients treated and untreated, and so,
perhaps, end all plague forever; he would harden his heart and
keep clear his eyes.

“We will get Sondelius to go along,” said Gottlieb. “He will
do the big boom-boom and so bring us the credit in the news¬
papers which, I am now told, a Director must obtain.”

Sondelius did not merely consent — he insisted.

Martin had never seen a foreign country — he could not think
of Canada, where he had spent a vacation as hotel-waiter, as
foreign to him. He could not comprehend that he was really
going to a place of palm trees and brown faces and languid
Christmas Eves. He was busy (while Sondelius was out order¬
ing linen suits and seeking a proper new sun helmet) making
anti-plague phage on a large scale: a hundred liters of it, sealed

ARROWS MITH

349

in tiny ampules. He felt like the normal Martin, but con¬
ferences and powers were considering him.

There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees to advise
Martin and Sondelius as to their methods. For it the Presi¬
dent of the University of Wilmington gave up a promising inter¬
view with a millionaire alumnus, Ross McGurk gave up a
game of golf, and one of the three university scientists arrived
by aeroplane. Called in from the laboratory, a rather young
man in a wrinkled soft collar, dizzy still with the details of
Erlenmeyer flasks, infusorial earth, and sterile filters, Martin
was confronted by the Men of Measured Merriment, and found
that he was no longer concealed in the invisibility of insignifi¬
cance but regarded as a leader who was expected not only to
produce miracles but to explain beforehand how important
and mature and miraculous he was.

He was shy before the spectacled gravity of the five Trustees
as they sat, like a Supreme Court, at the dais table in Bonanza
Hall— Gottlieb a little removed, also trying to look grave and
supreme. But Sondelius rolled in, enthusiastic and tremendous,
and suddenly Martin was not shy, nor was he respectful to his
one-time master in public health.

Sondelius wanted to exterminate all the rodents in St. Hu¬
bert, to enforce a quarantine, to use Yersin’s serum and Haff-
kine’s prophylactic, and to give Martin’s phage to everybody
in St. Hubert, all at once, all with everybody.

Martin protested. For the moment it might have been Gott¬
lieb speaking.

He knew, he flung at them, that humanitarian feeling would
make it impossible to use the poor devils of sufferers as mere
objects of experiment, but he must have at least a few real
test cases, and he was damned, even before the Trustees he was
damned, if he would have his experiment so mucked up by
multiple treatment that they could never tell whether the cures
were due to Yersin or Haffkine or phage or none of them.

The Trustees adopted his plan. After all, while they desired
to save humanity, wasn’t it better to have it saved by a Mc¬
Gurk representative than by \ersin or Haffkine or the out¬
landish Sondelius?

It was agreed that if Martin could find in St. Hubert a dis¬
trict which was comparatively untouched by the plague, he
should there endeavor to have test cases, one half injected with

350

ARROWSMITH

phage, one half untreated. In the badly afflicted districts, he
might give the phage to every one, and if the disease slackened
unusually, that would be a secondary proof.

Whether the St. Hubert government, since they had not asked
for aid, would give Martin power to experiment and Sondelius
police authority, the Trustees did not know. The Surgeon
General, a chap named Inchcape Jones, had replied to their
cables: “No real epidemic not need help.” But McGurk
promised that he would pull his numerous wires to have the
McGurk Commission (Chairman, Martin Arrowsmith, B.A.,
M.D.) welcomed by the authorities.

Sondelius still insisted that in this crisis mere experimenta¬
tion was heartless, yet he listened to Martin’s close-reasoned
fury with the enthusiasm which this bull-necked eternal child
had for anything which sounded new and preferably true. He
did not, like Almus Pickerbaugh, regard a difference of scien¬
tific opinion as an attack on his character.

He talked of going on his own, independent of Martin and
McGurk, but he was won back when the Trustees murmured
that though they really did wish the dear man wouldn’t fool
with sera, they would provide him with apparatus to kill all
the rats he wanted.

Then Sondelius was happy:

“And you watch me! Iam the captain-general of rat-killers!
I yoost walk into a warehouse and the rats say, ‘There’s that
damn’ old Uncle Gustaf — what’s the use?’ and they turn up
their toes and die! I am yoost as glad I have you people
behind me, because I am broke — I went and bought some oil
stock that don’t look so good now — and I shall need a lot
of hydrocyanic acid gas. Oh, those rats! You watch me!
Now I go and telegraph I can’t keep a lecture engagement next
week — huh! me to lecture to a women’s college, me that can
talk rat-language and know seven beautiful deadly kind of
traps!”

Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood
as a hospital intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy
making phage and receiving unsolicited advice from all the
Institute staff to think of the dangers of a plague epidemic,
but when he went to bed, when his brain was still revolving with

ARROWSMITH 351

plans, he pictured rather too well the chance of dying, un¬
pleasantly.

When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a
death-haunted isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and
faces (a place, probably, where they spoke funny languages
and didn’t have movies or tooth-paste), she took the notion
secretively away with her, to look at it and examine it, precisely
as she often stole little foods from the table and hid them and
meditatively ate them at odd hours of the night, with the
pleased expression of a bad child. Martin was glad that she
did not add to his qualms by worrying. Then, after three
days, she spoke:

“I’m going with you.”

“You are not!”

“Well. ... I am!”

“It’s not safe.”

“Silly! Of course it is. You can shoot your nice old phage
into me, and then I’ll be absolutely all right. Oh, I have a
husband who cures things, I have! I’m going to blow in a lot
of money for thin dresses, though I bet St. Hubert isn’t any
hotter than Dakota can be in August.”

“Listen! Lee, darling! Listen! I do think the phage will
immunize against the plague — you bet I’ll be mighty well in¬
jected with it myself! — but I don’t know, and even if it were
practically perfect, there’d always be some people it wouldn’t
protect. You simply can’t go, sweet. Now I’m terribly
sleepy — ”

Leora seized his lapels, as comic fierce as a boxing kitten,
but her eyes were not comic, nor her wailing voice ; age-old wail
of the soldiers’ women:

“Sandy, don’t you know I haven’t any life outside of you?
I might’ve had, but honestly, I’ve been glad to let you absorb
me. I’m a lazy, useless, ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep
you comfortable. If you were off there, and I didn’t know you
were all right, or if you died and somebody else cared for
your body that I’ve loved so — haven’t I loved it, dear? — I’d
go mad. I mean it — can’t you see I mean it — I’d go mad! It’s
just — I’m you, and I got to be with you. And I will help
you! Make your media and everything. You know how jof ten
I’ve helped you. Oh, I’m not much good at McGurk, with
all your awful’ complicated jiggers, but I did help you at
Nautilus— I did help you, didn’t I?— and maybe in St.

352

ARROWS MITH

Hubert” — her voice was the voice of women in midnight
terror — “maybe you won’t find anybody that can help you even
my little bit, and I’ll cook and everything — ”

“Darling, don’t make it harder for me. Going to be hard
enough in any case — ”

“Damn you, Sandy Arrowsmith, don’t you dare use those old
stuck-up expressions that husbands have been drooling out to
wives forever and ever! I’m not a wife, any more’n you’re a
husband. You’re a rotten husband! You neglect me abso¬
lutely. The only time you know what I’ve got on is when some
doggone button slips — and how they can pull off when a person
has gone over ’em and sewed ’em all on again is simply beyond
me! — and then you bawl me out. But I don’t care. I’d rather
have you than any decent husband. . . . Besides. I’m going.”

Gottlieb opposed it, Sondelius roared about it, Martin wor¬
ried about it, but Leora went, and — his only act of craftiness
as Director of the Institute — Gottlieb made her “Secretary and
Technical Assistant to the McGurk Plague and Bacteriophage
Commission to the Lesser Antilles,” and blandly gave her a
salary.

The day before the Commission sailed, Martin insisted that
Sondelius take his first injection of phage. He refused.

“No, I will not touch it till you get converted to humanity,
Martin, and give it to everybody in St. Hubert. And you
will! Wait till you see them suffering by the thousand. You
have not seen such a thing. Then you will forget science and
try to save everybody. You shall not inject me till you will
inject all my negro friends down there too.”

That afternoon Gottlieb called Martin in. He spoke with
hesitation:

“You’re off for Blackwater to-morrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hm. You may be gone some time. I — Martin, you are
my oldest friend in New York, you and the good Miriam.
Tell me: At first you and Terry t’ought I should not take up
the Directorship. Don’t you now t’ink I was wise?”

Martin stared, then hastily he lied and said that which was
comforting and expected.

“I am glad you t’ink so. You have known so long what I

ARROW SMITH

353

have tried to do. I haf faults, but I t’ink I begin to see a real
scientific note coming into the Institute at last, after the
popoolarity-chasing of Tubbs and Holabird. ... I wonder
how I can discharge Holabird, that pants-presser of science?
If only he dit not know Capitola so well — socially, they call
it ! But anyway —

“There are those that said Max Gottlieb could not do the
child job of running an institution. Huh! Buying note-books!
Hiring women that sweep floors! Or no — the floors are swept
by women hired by the superintendent of the building, nicht
waJtr ? But anyway —

“I did not make a rage when Terry and you doubted. I am
a great fellow for allowing every one his opinion. But it pleases
me — I am very fond of you two boys — the only real sons I
have — ” Gottlieb laid his withered hand on Martin’s arm. “It
pleases me that you see now I am beginning to make a real
scientific Institute. Though I have enemies. Martin, you
would t’ink I was joking if I told you the plotting against
me —

“Even Yeo. I t’ought he was my friend. I t’ought he was
a real biologist. But just to-day he comes to me and says he
cannot get enough sea-urchins for his experiments. As if. I
could make sea-urchins out of thin air! He said I keep him
short of all materials. Me! That have always stood for I
do not care what they pay scientists, but always I have stood,
against that fool Silva and all of them, all my enemies —

“You do not know how many enemies I have, Martin! They
do not dare show their faces. They smile to me, but they
whisper— I will show Holabird— always he plot against me
and try to win over Pearl Robbins, but she is a good girl, she
knows what I am doing, but — ” _

He looked perplexed; he peered at Martin as though he did
not quite recognize him, and begged:

“Martin, I grow old — not in years — it is a lie I am over
seventy — but I have my worries. Do you mind if I give you
advice as I have done so often, so many years? Though you
are not a schoolboy now in Queen City— -no, at Winnemac it
was. You are a man and you are a genuine worker. But

“Be sure you do not let anything, not even your own good
kind heart, spoil your experiment at St. Hubert. I do not
make funniness about humanitarianism as I used to; some¬
times now I t’ink the vulgar and contentious human race may

354

ARROWSMITH

yet have as much grace and good taste as the cats. But if
this is to be, there must be knowledge. So many men, Martin,
are kind and neighborly; so few have added to knowledge.
You have the chance! You may be the man who ends all
plague, and maybe old Max Gottlieb will have helped, too,
hein, maybe?

"You must not be just a good doctor at St. Hubert. You
must pity, oh, so much the generation after generation yet
to come that you can refuse to let yourself indulge in pity for
the men you will see dying.

"Dying. ... It will be peace.

"Let nothing, neither beautiful pity nor fear of your own
death, keep you from making this plague experiment complete.
And as my friend — If you do this, something will yet have
come out of my Directorship. If but one fine thing could
come, to justify me—”

When Martin came sorrowing into his laboratory he found
Terry Wickett waiting.

“Say, Slim,” Terry blurted, “just wanted to butt in and
suggest, now for St. Gottlieb’s sake keep your phage notes
complete and up-to-date, and keep ’em in ink!”

"Terry, it looks to me as if you thought I had a fine chance
of not coming back with the notes myself.”

“Aw, what’s biting you!” said Terry feebly.

The epidemic in St. Hubert must have increased, for on the
day before the McGurk Commission sailed, Dr. Inchcape Jones
declared that the island was quarantined. People might come
in, but no one could leave. He did this despite the fretting
of the Governor, Sir Robert Fairlamb, and the protests of the
hotel-keepers who fed on tourists, the ex-rat-catchers who
drove the same, Kellett the Red Leg who sold them tickets,
and all the other representatives of sound business in St.
Hubert.

Besides his ampules of phage and his Luer syringes for in¬
jection, Martin made personal preparations for the tropics. He
bought, in seventeen minutes, a Palm Beach suit, two new

ARROWS MITH

355

shirts, and, as St. Hubert was a British possession and as he
had heard that all Britishers carry canes, a stick which the
shop-keeper guaranteed to be as good as genuine malacca.

vi \

They started, Martin and Leora and Gustaf Sondelius, on
a winter morning, on the six-thousand-ton steamer St. Buryan
of the McGurk Line, which carried machinery and flour and
codfish and motors to the Lesser Antilles and brought back
molasses, cocoa, avocados, Trinidad asphalt. A score of win¬
ter tourists made the round trip, but only a score, and there
was little handkerchief-waving.

The McGurk Line pier was in South Brooklyn, in a district
of brown anonymous houses. The sky was colorless above
dirty snow. Sondelius seemed well content. As they drove
upon a wharf littered with hides and boxes and disconsolate
steerage passengers, he peered out of their crammed taxicab
and announced that the bow of the St. Buryan — all they could
see of it — reminded him of the Spanish steamer he had taken to
the Cape Verde Isles. But to Martin and Leora, who had
read of the drama of departure, of stewards darting with
masses of flowers, dukes and divorcees being interviewed, and
bands playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” the St. Buryan
was unromantic and its ferry-like casualness was discouraging.

Only Terry came to see them off, bringing a box of candy
for Leora.

Martin had never ridden a craft larger than a motor launch.
He stared up at the black wall of the steamer’s side. As they
mounted the gangplank he was conscious that he was cutting
himself off from the safe, familiar land, and he was embar¬
rassed by the indifference of more experienced-looking pas¬
sengers, staring down from the rail. Aboard, it seemed to him
that the forward deck looked like the backyard of an old-iron
dealer, that the St. Buryan leaned too much to one side, and
that even in the dock she swayed undesirably.

The whistle snorted contemptuously; the hawsers were cast
off. Terry stood on the pier till the steamer, with Martin and
Leora and Sondelius above him, their stomachs pressed against
the rail, had slid past him, then he abruptly clumped away.

Martin realized that he was off for the perilous sea and the
perilous plague; that there was no possibility of leaving the

356 ARROWS MITH

ship till they should reach some distant island. This narrow
deck, with its tarry lines between planks, was his only home.
Also,’ in the breeze across the wide harbor he was beastly cold,
and in general God help him!

As the St. Bwryan was warped out into the river, as Martin
was suggesting to his Commission, “How about going down¬
stairs and seeing if we can raise a drink? there was the sound
of a panicky taxicab on the pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure
running — but so feebly, so shakily — and they realized that it
was Max Gottlieb, peering for them, tentatively raising his
thin arm in greeting, not finding them in the line at the rail, and
turning sadly away.

VII

As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works,
evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the
boat deck.

Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick oft Cape
Hatteras, and tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was
cold, and in a ladylike manner she was sick, but she was not
at all tired. She insisted on conveying information to him,
from the West Indian guide-book which she had earnestly
bought.

Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea
with the Captain, scouse with the fo’c’sle, and intellectual con¬
ferences with the negro missionary in the steerage. He was to
be heard — always he was to be heard: singing on the prome¬
nade deck, defending Bolshevism against the boatswain, argu¬
ing oil-burning with the First Officer, and explaining to the bar
steward how to make a gin sling. He held a party for the chil¬
dren in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer
a volume of navigation to study between parties.

He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of the St.
Buryan, but he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss
Gwilliam; he tried to cheer her on a seemingly lonely adven¬
ture.

Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her
section of New Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a church¬
warden, her grandfather had been a solid farmer. That she
had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the prefer¬
ence of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and she

ARRO WSMITH

357

was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also
a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve
the wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native
ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public — if
only she learned how to sing.

She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in
the least like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-
managers she was accustomed to meet at the country club, and
what was worse, he did not ask her opinions on art and good
form. His stories about generals and that sort of people could
be discounted as lies, for did he not associate with grimy engi¬
neers? He needed some of her gentle but merry chiding.

When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his
ludicrous up-and-down Swedish sing-song that it was a fine
evening, she remarked, “Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been
up to something smart again to-day? Or have you been giv¬
ing somebody else a chance to talk, for once?”

She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with
none of the obedient reverence which any example of cultured
American womanhood has a right to expect from all males,
even foreigners.

Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, “Slim — if I may call
you so, like Terry — I think you and your Gottlieb are right.
There is no use saving fools. It’s a great mistake to be natural.
One should always be a stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one
would have respect even from artistic New Jersey spinsters.
. . . How strange is conceit! That I who have been cursed
and beaten by so many Great Ones, who was once led out to
be shot in a Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed
by them as by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the
enemy! ”

Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen
arguing with the ship’s doctor about sutures in negro skulls,
and he invented a game of deck cricket. But one evening
when he sat reading in the “social hall,” stooped over, wearing
betraying spectacles and his mouth puckered, Martin walked
past the window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was
growing old.

VIII

As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her,
really looked at her pale profile, after years when she had

358 ARROWSMITH

been a matter of course. He pondered on her as he pondered
on phage; he weightily decided that he had neglected her, and
weightily he started right in to be a good husband.

“Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how
lonely you must have been in New York.”

“But I haven’t.” t ..

“Don’t be foolish! Of course you’ve been lonely! Well,
when we get back, I’ll take a little time off every day and
we’ll — we’ll have walks and go to the movies and everything.
And I’ll send you flowers, every morning. Isn’t it a relief to
just sit here! But I do begin to think and realize how I ve
prob’ly neglected — • Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly
dull?”

“Hunka. Really.”

“No, but tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Now hang it, Leora, here when I do have the first chance
in eleven thousand years to think about you, and I come right
out frankly and admit how slack I’ve been— And planning

to send you flowers — ” ....

“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me!
You want the luxury of harrowing yourself by thinking what a
poor, bawling, wretched, story-book wife I am. You’re work¬
ing up to become perfectly miserable if you can’t enjoy being
miserable. ... It would be terrible, when we got back to
New York, if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to
showing me a good time. You’d go at it like a bull. I d have
to be so dratted grateful for the flowers every day — the days
you didn’t forget! — and the way you’d sling me off to the
movies when I wanted to stay home and snooze — ”

“Well, by thunder, of all the — ”

“No, please! You’re dear and good, but you’re so bossy
that I’ve always got to be whatever you want, even if it’s
lonely. But — Maybe I’m lazy. I’d rather just snoop around
than have to work at being well-dressed and popular and all
those jobs. I fuss over the flat — hang it, wish I’d had the
kitchen repainted while we’re away, it’s a nice little kitchen —
and I make believe read my French books, and go out for a
walk, and look in the windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and
the day slides by. Sandy, I do love you awful’ much; if I
could, I’d be as ill-treated as the dickens, so you could enjoy
it, but I’m no good at educated lies, only at easy little ones

ARROWS MITH

359

like the one I told you last week — I said I hadn’t eaten any
candy and didn’t have a stomach-ache, and I’d eaten half a
pound and I was sick as a pup. . . . Gosh, I’m a good wife
I am!”

They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk
they stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea,
of life. Always he had lived in his imagination. As he had
blundered through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband
trotting out to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his brain-pan
had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets,
but microorganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks
cloudy with bacteria, himself giving orders to his gargon, Max
Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams
had clung about his work. Now, no less passionately, he
awoke to the ship, the mysterious sea, the presence of Leora,
and he cried to her, in the warm tropic winter dusk:

“Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon,
if I’m successful in St. Hubert, I’ll begin to count in science,
and we’ll go abroad, to your France and England and Italy
and everywhere!”

“Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going places I”

He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-
lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she
watched him sleeping.

He was not handsome ; he was grotesque as a puppy napping
on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep
in the crumpled pillow he had encircled with both his arms.
She looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her
lips like tiny flung arrows.

“I do love him so when he’s frowsy! Don’t you see, Sandy,
I was wise to come! You’re so worn out. It might get you,
and nobody but me could nurse you. Nobody knows all your
cranky ways — about how you hate prunes and everything.
Night and day I’ll nurse you — the least whisper and I’ll be
awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff — And I’ll have
ice, too, if I have to sneak into some millionaire’s house and
steal it out of his highballs! My dear!”

She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon
him, and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room.

36o

ARROWSMITH

It did not contain, much save a round table, a few chairs, and
a Sybaritic glass and mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose
was never discovered.

“It’s so sort of — Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought
to fix it up somehow.”

But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pic¬
tures which brings humanness into a dead room. Never in
her life had she spent three minutes in arranging flowers. She
looked doubtful, she smiled and turned out the light, and
slipped in to him.

She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languid¬
ness, a slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought,
“I like a small bedroom, because Sandy is nearer and I don’t
get so scared by things. What a dratted bully the man is!
Some day I’m going to up and say to him: ‘You go to the
devil!’ I will so! Darling, we will hike off to France together,
just you and I, won’t we!”

She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure —

CHAPTER XXXHI

Misty mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-
crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates.
In Martinique were white-faced houses like provincial France,
and a boiling market full of colored women with kerchiefs
ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot St. Lucia, and Saba
that is all one lone volcano. They devoured paw-paws and
breadfruit and avocados, bought from coffee-colored natives
who "came alongside in nervous small boats; they felt the
languor of the isles, and panted before they approached Bar¬
bados.

Just beyond was St. Hubert.

None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They
were raging that the company should have taken them into
danger. In the tepid wind they felt the plague.

The skipper reassured them, in a formal address. Yes, they
would stop at Blackwater, the port of St. Hubert, but they
would anchor far out in the harbor; and while the passengers
bound for St. Hubert would be permitted to go ashore, in the
port-doctor’s launch, no one in St. Hubert would be allowed
to leave — nothing from that pest-hole would touch the steamer
except the official mail, which the ship’s surgeon would dis-
infect.

(The ship’s surgeon was wondering, the while, how you dis¬
infected mail— let’s se^-sulfur burning in the presence of

moisture, wasn’t it?) _

The skipper had been trained in oratory by arguments with
wharf-masters, and the tourists were reassured. But Martin
murmured to his Commission, “I hadn’t thought of that. Once
we go ashore, we’ll be practically prisoners till the epidemic s

0yer _ if it ever does get over — prisoners with the plague

around us.”

“Why, of course!” said Sondelius.

361

362

ARROWSMITH

They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by
afternoon. It was late night, with most of the passengers
asleep, when they arrived at Blackwater. As Martin came out
on the damp and vacant deck, it seemed unreal, harshly un¬
friendly, and of the coming battleground he saw nothing but a
few shore lights beyond uneasy water.

About their arrival there was something timorous and illicit.
The ship’s surgeon ran up and down, looking disturbed; the
captain could be heard growling on the bridge; the first officer
hastened up to confer with him and disappeared below again;
and there was no one to meet them. The steamer waited, roll¬
ing in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch a hot
miasma.

“And here’s where we’re going to land and stay!” Martin
grunted to Leora, as they stood by their bags, their cases of
phage, on the heaving, black-shining deck near the top of the
accommodation-ladder.

Passengers came out in dressing-gowns, chattering, “Yes,
this must be the place, those lights there. Must be fierce.
What? Somebody going ashore? Oh, sure, those two doc¬
tors. Well, they got nerve. I certainly don’t envy them!”

Martin heard.

From shore a pitching light made toward the ship, slid
round the bow, and sidled to the bottom of the accommodation-
ladder. In the haze of a lantern held by a steward at the foot
of the steps, Martin could see a smart covered launch, manned
by darky sailors in naval uniform and glazed black straw hats
with ribbons, and commanded by a Scotch-looking man with
some sort of a peaked uniform cap over a civilian jacket.

The captain clumped down the swinging steps beside the
ship. While the launch bobbed, its wet canvas top glistening,
he had a long and complaining conference with the commander
of the launch, and received a pouch of mail, the only thing to
come aboard.

The ship’s surgeon took it from the captain with aversion,
grumbling, “Now where can I get a barrel to disinfect these
dam’ letters in?”

Martin and Leora and Sondelius waited, without option.

They had been joined by a thin woman in black whom they
had not seen all the trip — one of the mysterious passengers

ARROWS MITH

363

who are never noticed till they come on deck at landing. Ap¬
parently she was going ashore. She was pale, her hands
twitching.

The captain shouted at them, “All right — all right — all right!
You can go now. Hustle, please. I’ve got to get on. . . .
Damn’ nuisance.”

The St. Buryan had not seemed large or luxurious, but it
was a castle, steadfast among storms, its side a massy wall, as
Martin crept down the swaying stairs, thinking all at once,
“We’re in for it; like going to the scaffold — they lead you
along — no chance to resist,” and, “You’re letting your imagina¬
tion run away with you; quit it now!” and, “Is it too late to
make Lee stay behind, on the steamer?” and an agonized, “Oh,
Lord, are the stewards handling that phage carefully?” Then
he was on the tiny square platform at the bottom of the accom¬
modation-ladder, the ship’s side was high above him, lit by
the round ports of cabins, and some one was helping him into
the launch.

As the unknown woman in black came aboard, Martin
saw in lantern light how her lips tightened once, then her whole
face went blank, like one who waited hopelessly.

Leora squeezed his hand, hard, as he helped her in.

He muttered, while the steamer whistled, “Quick! You
can still go back! You must!”

“And leave the pretty launch? Why, Sandy! Just look
at the elegant engine it’s got! . . . Gosh, I’m scared blue!”

As the launch sputtered, swung round, and headed for the
filtering of lights ashore, as it bowed its head and danced
to the swell, the sandy-headed official demanded of Martin:

“You’re the McGurk Commission?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He sounded pleased yet cold, a busy voice and hu¬
morless.

“Are you the port-doctor?” asked Sondelius.

“No, not exactly. I’m Dr. Stokes, of St. Swithin’s Parish.
We’re all of us almost everything, nowadays. The port-doc¬
tor — In fact he died couple of days ago.”

Martin grunted. But his imagination had ceased to agitate

him. .

“You’re Dr. Sondelius, I imagine. I know your work m
Africa, in German East — was out there myself. And you’re
Dr. Arrowsmith? I read your plague phage paper. Much

ARROWSMITH

364

impressed. Now I have just the chance to say before we go
ashore — You’ll both be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G.,
has lost his head. Running in circles, lancing buboes — afraid
to burn Carib, where most of the infection is. Arrowsmith,
I have a notion of what you may want to do experimentally.
If Inchcape balks, you come to me in my parish — if I’m still
alive. Stokes, my name is. . . . Damn it, boy, what are you
doing? Trying to drift clear down to Venezuela? . . . Inch¬
cape and H.E. are so afraid that they won’t even cremate the
bodies — some religious prejudice among the blacks — obee or
something.”

“I see,” said Martin.

“How many cases plague you got now?” said Sondelius.

“Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats.

. . . I’m so sleepy! . . . Well, welcome, gentlemen — ” He
flung out his arms in a dry hysteria. “Welcome to the Island
of Hesperides!”

Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy
barracks on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most
of the town was dark, dark and wickedly still. There was no
face along the dim waterfront — warehouses, tram station, mean
hotels — and they ground against a pier, they went ashore,
without attention from customs officials. There were no car¬
riages, and the hotel-runners who once had pestered tourists
landing from the St. Buryan, whatever the hour, were dead
now or hidden.

The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering
with her suit-case — she had said no word, and they never saw
her again. The Commission, with Stokes and the harbor-
police who had manned the launch, carried the baggage (Mar¬
tin weaving with a case of the phage) through the rutty bal¬
conied streets to the San Marino Hotel.

Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips,
stared at them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the
hotel, when they stood before it, a weary caravan laden with
bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed manageress peered from a
window before she would admit them.

As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first
stirring of life: a crying woman and a bewildered child follow¬
ing an open wagon in which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.

“And I might have saved all of them, with phage,” he whis¬
pered to himself.

365

ARROWS MITH

His forehead was cold, yet it was greasy with sweat as he
babbled to the manageress of rooms and meals, as he prayed
that Leora might not have seen the Things in that slow creak¬
ing wagon. „

“I’d have choked her before I let her come, if I d known,

he was shuddering.

The woman apologized, “I must ask you gentlemen to carry
your things up to your rooms. Our boys — They aren’t here

any more.” , . , . , , ,

What became of the walking stick which, in such pleased

vanity, Martin had bought in New York, he never knew. He
was too busy guarding the cases of phage, and worrying,
“Maybe this stuff would save everybody.”

Now Stokes of St. Swithin’s was a reticent man and hard,
but when they had the last bag up-stairs, he leaned his head
against a door, cried, “My God, Arrowsmith, I’m so glad you ve
got here,” and broke from them, running. . . . One oi the
negro harbor-police, expressionless, speaking the English of the
Antilles with something of the accent of Piccadilly, said, bar,
have you any other command for I? If you permit, we boys
will now go home. Sar, on the table is the whisky Dr. Stokes

have told I to bring.” . , ,

Martin stared. It was Sondelius who said, 'Thank you
very much, boys. Here’s a quid between you. Now get some

sleep.”

They saluted and were not.

Sondelius made the novices as merry as he could tor halt

an hour. . j

Martin and Leora woke to a broiling, flarmg, green and

crimson morning, yet ghastly still; awoke and realized that
about them was a strange land, as yet unseen, and before them
the work that in distant New York had seemed dramatic and
joyful and that stank now of the charnel house.

A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a negress who,
before she would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door
Sondelius rumbled in from his room, m an impassioned silk
dressing-gown. If ever, spectacled and stooped, he had looked

old, now he was young and boisterous. Tpt

“Hey, ya, Slim, I think we get some work here! Let me

ARROWSMITH

366

at those rats! This Inchcape— to try to master them with
strychnin! A noble melon! Leora, when you divorce Martin,
you marry me, heh? Give me the salt. Yey, I sleep fine!”

The night before, Martin had scarce looked at their room.
Now he was diverted by what he considered its foreignness:
the lofty walls of wood painted a watery blue, the wide furni-
tureless spaces, the bougainvillaea at the window, and in the
courtyard the merciless heat and rattling metallic leaves of pal-
mettoes.

Beyond the courtyard walls were the upper stories of a
balconied Chinese shop, and the violent-colored skylight of the
Blue Bazaar.

He felt that there should be a clamor from this exotic world,
but there was only a rebuking stillness, and even Sondelius be¬
came dumb, though he had his moment. He waddled back to
his room, dressed himself in surah silk last worn on the East
Coast of Africa, and returned bringing a sun-helmet which
secretly he had bought for Martin.

In linen jacket and mushroom helmet, Martin belonged more
to the tropics than to his own harsh Northern meadows. But
his pleasure in looking foreign was interrupted by the entrance
of the Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones, lean but
apple-cheeked, worried and hasty.

“Of course you chaps are welcome, but really, with all we
have to do I’m afraid we can’t give you the attention you
doubtless expect,” he said indignantly.

Martin sought for adequate answer. It was Sondelius who
spoke of a non-existent cousin who was a Harley Street special¬
ist, and who explained that all they wanted was a laboratory
for Martin and, for himself, a chance to slaughter rats. How
many times, in how many lands, had Gustaf Sondelius flattered
pro-consuls, and persuaded the heathen to let themselves be
saved !

Under his hands the Surgeon General became practically
human; he looked as though he really thought Leora was
pretty; he promised that he might perhaps let Sondelius tam¬
per with his rats. He would return that afternoon and conduct
them to the house prepared for them, Penrith Lodge, on the
safe secluded hills behind Blackwater. And (he bowed gal¬
lantly) he thought that Mrs. Arrowsmith would find the Lodge
a topping bungalow, with three rather decent servants. The
butler, though a colored chap, was an old mess-sergeant.

367

ARROWSMITH

Inchcape Jones had scarce gone when at the door there was
a pounding and it opened on Martin’s classmate at Winnemac,

Dr. the Rev. Ira Hinkley. _ . . , ,

Martin had forgotten Ira, that bulky Christian who had
tried to save him during otherwise dulcet hours of dissection.
He recalled him confusedly. The man came in, vast and lum¬
bering. His eyes were staring and altogether mad, and his

voice was parched: _ . , ,, ,

“Hello, Mart. Yump, it’s old Ira. I m in charge of all the
chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood here. Oh, Mart, if
you only knew the wickedness of the natives, and the way
they lie and sing indecent songs and commit all manner of
vileness! And the Church of England lets them wallow in
their sins! Only us to save them. I heard you were coming.

I have been laboring, Mart. I’ve nursed the poor plague-
stricken devils, and I’ve told them how hellfire is roaring
about them. Oh, Mart, if you knew how my heart bleeds to
see these ignorant fellows going unrepentant to eternal tor¬
ture! After all these years I know you can’t still be a scoffer.
I come to you with open hands, begging you not merely to com¬
fort the sufferers but to snatch their souls from the burning
lakes of sulfur to which, in His everlasting mercy, the Lord
of Hosts hath condemned those that blaspheme against His

gospel, freely given — ” .

Again it was Sondelius who got Ira Hinkley out, not too
discontented, while Martin could only splutter, “Now how do
you suppose that maniac ever got here? This is going to be

^Before Inchcape Jones returned, the Commission ventured
out for their first sight of the town. . • . A Scientific Com¬
mission, yet all the while they were only boisterous Gustaf and
doubtful Martin and casual Leora. . ...

The citizens had been told that in bubonic plague, unlike
pneumonic, there is no danger from direct contact with people
developing the disease, so long as vermin were kept away, but
they did not believe it. They were afraid of one another, and
the more afraid of strangers. The Commission found a street
dying with fear. House-shutters were closed, hot slatted
patches in the sun; and the only traffic was an empty trolley-
car with a frightened motorman who peered down at them
and SDed up lest they come aboard. Grocery shops and drug¬
stores were open, but from their shady depths the shopkeepers

ARROWSMITH

368

looked out timidly, and when the Commission neared a fish-
stall, the one customer fled, edging past them.

Once a woman, never explained, a woman with wild un¬
gathered hair, ran by them shrieking, “My little boy — ”

They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long
corrugated-iron roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous
names of the commissioners who had built it — by voting bonds
for the building. It should have been buzzing with jovial
buyers and sellers, but in all the gaudy booths there were only
one negress with a row of twig besoms, one Hindu in gray
rags squatting before his wealth of a dozen vegetables. The
rest was emptiness, and a litter of rotted potatoes and scudding
papers.

Down a grim street of coal yards, they found a public
square, and here was the stillness not of sleep but of ancient
death.

The square was rimmed with the gloom of mango trees,
which shut out the faint-hearted breeze and cooped in the heat
— stale lifeless heat, in whose misery the leering silence was
the more dismaying. Through a break in the evil mangoes they
beheld a plaster house hung with black crape.

“It’s too hot to walk. Perhaps we’d better go back to the
hotel,” said Leora.

In the afternoon Inchcape Jones appeared with a Ford,
whose familiarity made it the more grotesque in this creepy
world, and took them to Penrith Lodge, on the cool hills be¬
hind Blackwater.

They traversed a packed native section of bamboo hovels,
and shops that were but unpainted, black-weathered huts,
without doors, without windows, from whose recesses dark
faces looked at them resentfully. They passed, at their colored
driver’s most jerky speed, a new brick structure in front of
which stately negro policemen with white gloves, white sun-
helmets, and scarlet coats cut by white belts, marched with
rifles at the carry.

Inchcape Jones sighed, “Schoolhouse. Turned it into pest-
house.. Hundred cases in there. Die every hour. Have to
guard it — patients get delirious and try to escape.”

ARRO WSMITH

369

After them trailed an odor of rotting.

Martin did not feel superior to humanity.

With broad porches and low roof, among bright flamboyants
?nd the cheerful sago palms, the bungalow of Penrith Lodge
lay high on a crest, looking across the ugly flat of the town
to the wash of sea. At its windows the reed jalousies whis¬
pered and clattered, and the high bare rooms were enlivened
by figured Carib scarfs. ... It had belonged to the port-
doctor, dead these three days.

Inchcape Jones assured the doubtful Leora that she would
nowhere else be so safe; the house was rat-proofed, and the
doctor had caught the plague at the pier, had died without
ever coming back to this well-beloved bungalow in which he,
the professional bachelor, had given the most clamorous par¬
ties in St. Hubert.

Martin had with him sufficient equipment for a small
laboratory, and he established it in a bedroom with gas and
running water. Next to it was his and Leora s bedroom, then
an apartment which Sondelius immediately made homelike by
dropping his clothes and his pipe ashes all over it.

There were two colored maids and an ex-soldier butler, who
received them and unpacked their bags as though the plague
did not exist.

Martin was perplexed by their first caller. He was a sin¬
gularly handsome young negro, quick-moving, intelligent of
eye. Like most white Americans, Martin had talked a great
deal about the inferiority of negroes and had learned nothing
whatever about them. He looked questioning as the young
man observed:

“My name is Oliver Marchand.”

“Yes?”

“Dr. Marchand — I have my M.D. from Howard.”

“Oh.”

“May I venture to welcome you, Doctor? And may I ask ,
before I hurry off— I have three cases from official _ families
isolated at the bottom of the hill — oh, yes, in this crisis they
permit a negro doctor to practise even among the whites!
gut — Dr. Stokes insists that D’Herelle and you are right in

370

ARROWSMITH

calling bacteriophage an organism. But what about Bordet’s
contention that it’s an enzyme?”

Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Mar-
chand, forgetting the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague
of race-fear, draw diagrams.

Marchand sighed, “I must go, Doctor. May I help you in
any way I can? It is a great privilege to know you.”

He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal.

“I never thought a negro doctor — I wish people wouldn’t
keep showing me how much I don’t know!” said Martin.

While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully
at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones’s
administration, which proved to be almost anything that could
be wrong.

A plague epidemic to-day, in a civilized land, is no longer
an affair of people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting
“Bring out your dead.” The fight against it is conducted like
modern warfare, with telephones instead of foaming chargers.
The ancient horror bears a face of efficiency. There are offices,
card indices, bacteriological examinations of patients and of
rats. There is, or should be, a lone director with superlegal
powers. There are large funds, education of the public by
placard and newspaper, brigades of rat-killers, a corps of dis¬
infectors, isolation of patients lest vermin carry the germs from
them to others.

In most of these particulars Inchcape Jones had failed. To
have the existence of the plague admitted in the first place, he
had had to fight the merchants controlling the House of As¬
sembly, who had howled that a quarantine would ruin them,
and who now refused to give him complete power and tried to
manage the epidemic with a Board of Health, which was some¬
what worse than navigating a ship during a typhoon by means
of a committee.

Inchcape Jones was courageous enough, but he could not
cajole people. The newspapers called him a tyrant, would not
help win over the public to take precautions against rats and
ground squirrels. He had tried to fumigate a few warehouses
with sulfur dioxid, but the owners complained that the fumes
stained fabrics and paint; and the Board of Health bade him

ARROW SMITH

37i

wait — wait a little while — wait and see. He had tried to have
the rats examined, to discover what were the centers of infec¬
tion, but his only bacteriologists were the overworked Stokes
and Oliver Marchand; and Inchcape Jones had often ex¬
plained, at nice dinner-parties, that he did not trust the in¬
telligence of negroes.

He was nearly insane; he worked twenty hours a day; he
assured himself that he was not afraid; he reminded himself
that he had an honestly won D.S.O.; he longed to have some
one besides a board of Red Leg merchants give him orders;
and always in the blur of his sleepless brain he saw the hills
of Surrey, his sisters in the rose-walk, and the basket-chairs
and tea-table beside his father’s tennis-lawn.

Then Sondelius, that crafty and often lying lobbyist, that un¬
moral soldier of the Lord, burst in and became dictator.

He terrified the Board of Health. He quoted his own ex¬
periences in Mongolia and India. He assured them that if they
did not cease being politicians, the plague might cling in St.
Hubert forever, so that they would no more have the amiable
dollars of the tourists and the pleasures of smuggling.

He threatened and flattered, and told a story which they
had never heard, even at the Ice House; and he had Inchcape
Jones appointed dictator of St. Hubert.

Gustaf Sondelius stood extremely close behind the dictator.

He immediately started rat-killing. On a warrant signed
by Inchcape Jones, he arrested the owner of a warehouse who
had declared that he was not going to have his piles of cocoa
ruined. He marched his policemen, stout'black fellows trained
in the Great War, to the warehouse, set them on guard, and
pumped in hydrocyanic acid gas.

The crowd gathered beyond the police line, wondering, doubt¬
ing. They could not believe that anything was happening,
for the cracks in the warehouse walls had been adequately
stuffed and there was no scent of gas. But the roof was leaky.
The gas crept up through it, colorless, diabolic, and suddenly
a buzzard circling above the roof tilted forward, fell slantwise,
and lay dead among the watchers.

A man picked it up, goggling.

“Dead, right enough,” everybody muttered. They looked at
Sondelius, parading among his soldiers, with reverence. .

His rat-crew searched each warehouse before pumping in
the gas, lest some one be left in the place, but in the third one

372

ARROWSMITH

a tramp had been asleep, and when the doors were anxiously
opened after the fumigation, there were not only thousands of
dead rats but also a dead and very stiff tramp.

“Poor fella — bury him,” said Sondelius.

There was no inquest.

Over a rum swizzle at the Ice House, Sondelius reflected, “I
wonder how many men I murder, Martin? When I was dis¬
infecting ships at Antofagasta, always afterward we find two
or three stowaways. They hide too good. Poor fellas.”

Sondelius arbitrarily dragged bookkeepers and porters from
their work, to pursue the rats with poison, traps, and gas, or
to starve them by concreting and screening stables and ware¬
houses. He made a violent red and green rat map of the
town. He broke every law of property by raiding shops for
supplies. He alternately bullied and caressed the leaders of
the House of Assembly. He called on Kellett, told stories to
his children, and almost wept as he explained what a good
Lutheran he was — and consistently (but not at Kellett’s) he
drank too much.

The Ice House, that dimmest and most peaceful among sa¬
loons, with its cool marble tables, its gilt-touched white walls,
had not been closed, though only the oldest topers and the
youngest bravos, fresh out from Home and agonizingly lonely
for Peckham or Walthamstow, for Peel Park or the Ciren¬
cester High Street, were desperate enough to go there, and of
the attendants there remained only one big Jamaica barman.
By chance he was among them all the most divine mixer of the
planter’s punch, the New Orleans fizz, and the rum swizzle.
His masterpieces Sondelius acclaimed, he alone placid among
the scary patrons who came in now not to dream but to gulp
and flee. After a day of slaughtering rats and disinfecting
houses he sat with Martin, with Martin and Leora, or with
whomever he could persuade to linger.

To Gustaf Sondelius, dukes and cobblers were alike remark¬
able, and Martin was sometimes jealous when he saw Son¬
delius turning to a cocoa-broker’s clerk with the same smile he
gave to Martin. For hours Sondelius talked, of Shanghai and
epistemology and the painting of Nevinson; for hours he sang
scurrilous lyrics of the Quarter, and boomed, “Yey, how I
kill the rats at Kellett’s wharf to-day! I don’t t’ink one little
swizzle would break down too many glomeruli in an honest
man’s kidneys.”

ARRO WSMITH

373

He was cheerful, but never with the reproving and infuriat¬
ing cheerfulness of an Ira Hinkley. He mocked himself, Mar¬
tin, Leora, and their work. At home dinner he never cared
what he ate (though he did care what he drank), which at
Penrith Lodge was desirable, in view of Leora’s efforts to com¬
bine the views of Wheatsylvania with the standards of West
Indian servants and the absence of daily deliveries. He
shouted and sang — and took precautions for working among
rats and the agile fleas: the high boots, the strapped wrists,
and the rubber neck-band which he had invented and which is
known in every tropical supply shop to-day as the Sondelius
Anti-vermin Neck Protector.

It happened that he was, without Martin or Gottlieb ever
understanding it, the most brilliant as well as the least pom¬
pous and therefore least appreciated warrior against epidemics
that the world has known.

Thus with Sondelius, though for Martin there were as yet
but embarrassment and futility and the fear of fear.

CHAPTER XXXIV

To persuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure a
test in which half of them might die, so that all plague might
— perhaps — be ended forever, was impossible. Martin argued
with Inchcape Jones, with Sondelius, but he had no favor, and
he began to meditate a political campaign as he would have
meditated an experiment.

He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though
he still resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation, to
give up the possible saving of millions for the immediate saving
of thousands. Inchcape Jones, a little rested now under Son-
delius’s padded bullying and able to slip into a sane routine,
drove Martin to the village of Carib, which, because of its
pest of infected ground squirrels, was proportionately worse
smitten than Blackwater.

They sped out of the capital by white shell roads agonizing
to the sun-poisoned eyes; they left the dusty shanties of sub¬
urban Yamtown for a land cool with bamboo groves and pal¬
mettos, thick with sugar-cane. From a hilltop they swung
down a curving road to a beach where the high surf boomed
in limestone caves. It seemed impossible that this joyous
shore could be threatened by plague, the slimy creature of dark
alleys.

The motor cut through a singing trade wind which told of
clean sails and disdainful men. They darted on where the
foam feathers below Point Carib and where, round that lone
royal palm on the headland, the bright wind hums. They
slipped into a hot valley, and came to the village of Carib and
to creeping horror.

The plague had been dismaying in Blackwater; in Carib it
was the end of all things. The rat-fleas had found fat homes
in the ground squirrels which burrowed in every garden about
the village. In Blackwater there had from the first been isola¬
tion of the sick, but in Carib death was in every house, and

374

ARROW SMITH

375

the village was surrounded by soldier police, with bayonets,
who let no one come or go save the doctors.

Martin was guided down the stinking street of cottages palm-
thatched and walled with cow-dung plaster on bamboo laths,
cottages shared by the roosters and the goats. He heard men
shrieking in delirium; a dozen times he saw that face of terror
— sunken bloody eyes, drawn face, open mouth — which marks
the Black Death; and once he beheld an exquisite girl child in
coma on the edge of death, her tongue black and round her
the scent of the tomb.

They fled away, to Point Carib and the trade wind, and
when Inchcape Jones demanded, “After that sort of thing, can
you really talk of experimenting?” then Martin shook his
head, while he tried to recall the vision of Gottlieb and all
their little plans: “half to get the phage, half to be sternly
deprived.”

It came to him that Gottlieb, in his secluded innocence, had
not realized what it meant to gain leave to experiment amid
the hysteria of an epidemic.

He went to the Ice House; he had a drink with a frightened
clerk from Derbyshire; he regained the picture of Gottlieb’s
sunken, demanding eyes; and he swore that he would not yield
to a compassion which in the end would make all compassion
futile.

Since Inchcape Jones could not understand the need of ex¬
perimentation, he would call on the Governor, Colonel Sir Rob¬
ert Fairlamb.

Though Government House was officially the chief residence
of St. Hubert, it was but a thatched bungalow a little larger
than Martin’s own Penrith Lodge. When he saw it, Martin felt
more easy, and he ambled up to the broad steps, at nine of the
evening, as though he were dropping in to call on a neighbor in
Wheatsyl vania.

He was stopped by a Jamaican man-servant of appalling
courtesy.

He snorted that he was Dr. Arrowsmith, head of the McGurk
Commission, and he was sorry but he must see Sir Robert at
once.

The servant was suggesting, in his blandest and most annoy-

376

ARROWSMITH

ing manner, that really Dr. Uh would do better to see the Sur¬
geon General, when a broad red face and a broad red voice
projected themselves over the veranda railing, with a rumble
of, “Send him up, Jackson, and don’t be a fool!”

Sir Robert and Lady Fairlamb were finishing dinner on the
verandah, at a small round table littered with coffee and
liqueurs and starred with candles. She was a slight, nervous
insignificance; he was rather puffy, very flushed, undoubtedly
courageous, and altogether dismayed; and at a time when no
laundress dared go anywhere, his evening shirt was luminous.

Martin was in his now beloved linen suit, with a crumply
soft shirt which Leora had been meanin’ to wash.

Martin explained what he wanted to do — what he must do,
if the world was ever to get over the absurdity of having
plague.

Sir Robert listened so agreeably that Martin thought he un¬
derstood, but at the end he bellowed:

“Young man, if I were commanding a division at the front,
with a dud show, an awful show, going on, and a War Office
clerk asked me to risk the whole thing to try out some precious
little invention of his own, can you imagine what I’d answer?
There isn’t much I can do now — these doctor Johnnies have
taken everything out of my hands— but as far as possible I
shall certainly prevent you Yankee vivisectionists from coming
in and using us as a lot of sanguinary — sorry, Evelyn — san¬
guinary corpses. Good night, sir ! ”

Thanks to Sondelius’s crafty bullying, Martin was able to
present his plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor
the temporarily suspended Board of Health, Inchcape Jones’
several hearty members of the House of Assembly, and Son-
delius himself, attending in the unofficial capacity which all
over the world he had found useful for masking a cheerful
tyranny. Sondelius even brought in the negro doctor, Oliver
Marchand, not on the ground that he was the most intelligent
person on the island (which happened to be Sondelius’s reason)
but because he “represented the plantation hands.”

Sondelius himself was as much opposed to Martin’s unemo¬
tional experiments as was Fairlamb; he believed that all ex¬
periments should be, by devices not entirely clear to him, car-

ARROW SMITH

377

ried on in the laboratory without disturbing the conduct of
agreeable epidemics, but he could never resist a drama like the
innocent meeting of the Special Board.

The meeting was set for a week ahead . . . with scores
dying every day. While he waited for it Martin manufactured
more phage and helped Sondelius murder rats, and Leora lis¬
tened to the midnight debates of the two men and tried to
make them acknowledge that it had been wise to let her come.
Inchcape Jones offered to Martin the position of Government
bacteriologist, but he refused lest he be sidetracked.

The Special Board met in Parliament House, all of them
trying to look not like their simple and domestic selves but
like judges. With them appeared such doctors of the island as
could find the time.

While Leora listened from the back of the room, Martin
addressed them, not unaware of the spectacle of little Mart
Arrowsmith of Elk Mills taken seriously by the rulers of a
tropic isle headed by a Sir Somebody. Beside him stood Max
Gottlieb, and in Gottlieb’s power he reverently sought to ex¬
plain that mankind has ever given up eventual greatness be¬
cause some crisis, some war or election or loyalty to a Messiah
which at the moment seemed weighty, has choked the patient
search for truth. He sought to explain that he could — per¬
haps — save half of a given district, but that to test for all time
the value of phage, the other half must be left without it . . .
though, he craftily told them, in any case the luckless half
would receive as much care as at present.

Most of the Board had heard that he possessed a magic cure
for the plague which, for unknown and probably discreditable
reasons, he was withholding, and they were not going to have
it withheld. There was a great deal of discussion rather un¬
connected with what he had said, and out of it came only the
fact that everybody except Stokes and Oliver Marchand was
against him; Kellett was angry with this American, Sir Robert
Fairlamb was beefily disapproving, and Sondelius admitted
that though Martin was quite a decent young man, he was a
fanatic.

Into their argument plunged a fury in the person of Ira
Hinkley, missionary of the Sanctification Brotherhood.

Martin had not seen him since the first morning in Black-
water. He gaped as he heard Ira pleading:

‘‘Gentlemen, I know almost the whole bunch of you are

ARROWSMITH

378

Church of England, but I beg you to listen to me, not as a
minister but as a qualified doctor of medicine. Oh, the wrath
of God is upon you — But I mean: I was a classmate of Arrow-
smith in the States. I’m onto him! He was such a failure
that he was suspended from medical school. A scientist! And
his boss, this fellow Gottlieb, he was fired from the University
of Winnemac for incompetence! I know ’em! Liars and
fools! Scorners of righteousness! Has anybody but Arrow-
smith himself told you he’s a qualified scientist?”

The face of Sondelius changed from curiosity to stolid Scan¬
dinavian wrath. He arose and shouted:

“Sir Robert, this man is crazy! Dr. Gottlieb is one of the
seven distinguished living scientists, and Dr. Arrowsmith is his
representative! I announce my agreement with him, com¬
plete. As you must have seen from my work, I’m perfectly
independent of him and entirely at your service, but I know
his standing and I follow him, quite humbly.”

The Special Board coaxed Ira Hinkley out, for the meanest
of reasons — in St. Hubert the whites do not greatly esteem the
holy ecstasies of negroes in the Sanctification Brotherhood
chapels — but they voted only to “give the matter their con¬
sideration,” while still men died by the score each day, and in
Manchuria as in St. Hubert they prayed for rest from the
ancient clawing pain.

Outside, as the Special Board trudged away, Sondelius blared
at Martin and the indignant Leora, “Yey, a fine fight!”

Martin answered, “Gustaf, you’ve joined me now. The first
darn’ thing you do, you come have a shot of phage.”

“No. Slim, I said I will not have your phage till you give
it to everybody. I mean it, no matter how much I make fools
of your Board.”

As they stood before Parliament House, a small motor pos¬
sessing everything but comfort and power staggered up to
them, and from it vaulted a man lean as Gottlieb and English
as Inchcape Jones.

“You Dr. Arrowsmith? My name is Twyford, Cecil Twy-
ford of St. Swithin’s Parish. Tried to get here for the Special
Board meeting, but my beastly foreman had to take the after¬
noon off and die of plague. Stokes has told me your plans.
Quite right. All nonsense to go on having plague. Board
refused? Sorry. Perhaps we can do something in St. Swith¬
in’s. Goo’ day.”

ARROWSMITH

379

All evening Martin and Sondelius were full of language,.
Martin went to bed longing for the regularity of working alL
night and foraging for cigarettes at dawn. He could not sleep,,
because an imaginary Ira Hinkley was always bursting in on
him.

Four days later he heard that Ira was dead.

Till he had sunk in coma, Ira had nursed and blessed his
people, the humble colored congregation in the hot tin chapel
which he had now turned into a pest-house. He staggered
from cot to cot, under the gospel texts he had lettered on the
whitewashed wall, then he cried once, loudly, and dropped by
the pine pulpit where he had joyed to preach.

One chance Martin did have. In Carib, where every third
man was down with plague and one doctor to attend them all,
he now gave phage to the entire village; a long strain of in¬
jections, not improved by the knowledge that one jaunty flea
from any patient might bring him the plague.

The tedium of dread was forgotten when he began to find
and make precise notes of a slackening of the epidemic, which
was occurring nowhere except here at Carib.

He came home raving to Leora, “I’ll show ’em! Now they’ll
let me try test conditions, and then when the epidemic’s over
we’ll hustle home. It’ll be lovely to be cold again! Wonder
if Holabird and Sholtheis are any more friendly now? Be
pretty good to see the little ole flat, eh?”

“Yes, won’t it! ” said Leora. “I wish I’d thought to have the
kitchen painted while we’re away. ... I think I’ll put that
blue chair in the bedroom.”

Though there was a decrease in the plague at Carib, Son¬
delius was worried, because it was the worst center for infected
ground squirrels on the island. He made decisions quickly.
One evening he explained certain things to Inchcape Jones and
Martin, rode down their doubts, and snorted:

“Only way to disinfect that place is to bum it burn th
whole thing. Have it done by morning, before anybody can

st°P us-” , , . , . .

With Martin as his lieutenant he marshaled his. troop of
rat-catchers — ruffians all of them, with high boots, tied jacket
sleeves, and ebon visages of piracy. They stole food from

ARROWS MITH

.380

shops, tents and blankets and camp-stoves from the Govern¬
ment military warehouse, and jammed their booty into motor
trucks. The line of trucks roared down to Carib, the rat¬
catchers sitting atop, singing pious hymns.

They charged on the village, drove out the healthy, carried
the sick on litters, settled them all in tents in a pasture up the
valley, and after midnight they burned the town.

The troops ran among the huts, setting them alight with
fantastic torches. The palm thatch sent up thick smoke, dead
sluggish white with currents of ghastly black through which
broke sudden flames. Against the glare the palmettos were
silhouetted. The solid-seeming huts were instantly changed
into thin bamboo frameworks, thin lines of black slats, with
the thatch falling in sparks. The flame lighted the whole val¬
ley; roused the terrified squawking birds, and turned the surf
at Point Carib to bloody foam.

With such of the natives as had strength enough and sense
enough, Sondelius’s troops made a ring about the burning vil¬
lage, shouting insanely as they clubbed the fleeing rats and
ground squirrels. In the flare of devastation Sondelius was a
fiend, smashing the bewildered rats with a club, shooting at
them as they fled, and singing to himself all the while the ob¬
scene chantey of Bill the Sailor. But at dawn he was nursing
the sick in the bright new canvas village, showing mammies
how to use their camp-stoves, and in a benevolent way dis¬
cussing methods of poisoning ground squirrels in their bur¬
rows.

Sondelius returned to Blackwater, but Martin remained in
the tent village for two days, giving them the phage, making
notes, directing the amateur nurses. He returned to Black-
water one mid-afternoon and sought the office of the Surgeon
General, or what had been the office of the Surgeon General
till Sondelius had come and taken it away from him.

Sondelius was there, at Inchcape Jones’s desk, but for once
he was not busy. He was sunk in his chair, his eyes bloodshot.

“Yey! We had a fine time with the rats at Carib, eh?
How is my new tent willage?” he chuckled, but his voice was
weak, and as he rose he staggered.

“What is it? What is it?”

“I t’ink — It’s got me. Some flea got me. Yes,” in a shaky
but extremely interested manner, “I was yoost thinking I will
go and quarantine myself. I have fever all right, and adenitis.

381

ARROWSMITH

My strength — Huh! I am almost sixty, but the way I can
lift weights that no sailor can touch — And I could fight five
rounds!° Oh, my God, Martin, I am so weak! Not scared!

No!”

But for Martin’s arms he would have collapsed.

He refused to return to Penrith Lodge and Leora’s nursing.
“I who have isolated so many — it is my turn,” he said.

Martin and Inchcape Jones found for Sondelius a meager
clean cottage— the family had died there, all of them, but it
had been fumigated. They procured a nurse and Martin him¬
self attended the sick man, trying to remember that once he
had been a doctor, who understood ice-bags and consolation.
One thing was not to be had— mosquito netting— and only of

this did Sondelius complain. _ , . , •

Martin bent over him, agonized to see how burning was his
skin, how swollen his face and his tongue, how weak his voice

“Gottlieb is right about these jests of God. Yey! His best
one is the tropics. God planned them so beautiful, flowers and
sea and mountains. He made the fruit to grow so well that
man need not work— and then tie laughed, and stuck m volca¬
noes and snakes and damp heat and early 'senility and th
plague and malaria. But the nastiest trick He ever played on

man was inventing the flea.” , , ,

His bloated lips widened, from his hot throat oozed a leeb
croaking, and Martin realized that he was trying to laugh.

' He became delirious, but between spasms he muttered, with
infinite pain, tears in his eyes at his own weakness:

“I want you to see how an agnostic can die.

“I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see
Stockholm, and Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow fa is,
and Holy Week at Sevilla. And one good last drunk I am
very peaceful, Slim. It hurts some, but life was a good game
And— I am a pious agnostic. Oh, Martin, give my people the
phage! Save all of them- God, I did not think they could

hurt me so!” ... ,

His heart had failed. He was still on his low cot.

Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for
Gustaf Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist I

382

ARROWSMITH

cape Jones’s demand that he give the phage to every one, still
do what he had been sent to do.

“I’m not a sentimentalist; I’m a scientist!” he boasted.

They snarled at him in the streets now; small boys called
him names and threw stones. They had heard that he was
wilfully withholding their salvation. The citizens came in
committees to beg him to heal their children, and he was so
shaken that he had ever to keep before him the vision of Gott-

1 Vhe panic was increasing. They who had at first kept cool
could not endure the strain of wakening at night to see upon
their windows the glow of the pile of logs on Admiral Knob,
the emergency crematory where Gustaf Sondelius and his curly
gray mop had been shoveled into the fire along with a crippled
negro boy and a Hindu beggar.

Sir Robert Fairlamb was a blundering hero, exasperating the
sick while he tried to nurse them; Stokes remained the Rock
of Ages — he had only three hours’ sleep a night, but he never
failed to take his accustomed fifteen minutes of exercise when
he awoke; and Leora was easy in Penrith Lodge, helping Mar¬
tin prepare phage.

It was the Surgeon General who went to pieces.

Robbed of his dependence on the despised Sondelius, sunk
again in a mad planlessness, Inchcape Jones shrieked when he
thought he was speaking low, and the cigarette which was ever
in his thin hand shook so that the smoke quivered up in trem¬
bling spirals.

Making his tour, he came at night on a sloop by which a
dozen Red Legs were escaping to Barbados, and suddenly he
was among them, bribing them to take him along.

As the sloop stood out from Blackwater Harbor he stretched
his arms toward his sisters and the peace of the Surrey hills,
but as the few frightened lights of the town were lost, he real¬
ized that he was a coward and came up out of his madness,
with his lean head high.

He demanded that they turn the sloop and take him back.
They refused, howling at him, and locked him in the cabin.
They were becalmed ; it was two days before they reached Bar¬
bados, and by then the world would know that he had de¬
serted.

Altogether expressionless, Inchcape Jones tramped from the
sloop to a waterfront hotel in Barbados, and stood for a long

383

ARROWS MITH

time in a slatternly room smelling of slop-pails. He would
never see his sisters and the cool hills. With the revolver
which he had carried to drive terrified patients back into the
isolation wards, with the revolver which he had carried at
Arras, he killed himself.

Thus Martin came to his experiment. Stokes was appointed
Surgeon General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal
assignment of Martin to St. Swithin’s Parish, as medical officer
with complete power. This, and the concurrence of Cecil Twy-
ford, made his experiment possible.

He was invited to stay at Twyford’s. His only trouble was
the guarding of Leora. He did not know what he would en¬
counter m St. Swithin’s, while Penrith Lodge was as safe as
any place on the island. When Leora insisted that during his
experiment, the cold thing_ which had stilled the laughter of
Sondelius might come to him and he might need her he trie
to satisfy her by promising that if there was a place for her m
St. Swithin’s, he would send for her.

Naturally, he was lying. , , .

‘‘Hard enough to see Gustaf go. By thunder she s not going

to run risks!” he vowed. , ,

He left her, protected by the maids and the soldier buder,

with Dr. Oliver Marchand to look in when he could.

In St Swithin’s Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and
sharp hills of southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken cane-
field?. Here Cecil Twyford, that lean abrupt man, ruled every

acre and interpreted every law.

His place, Frangipani Court, was a refuge from the hot
humming plain. The house was old and low, of thick stone and
plaster walls; the paneled rooms were lined with the china, the
portraits, and the swords of Twyfords for three hundred years
and between the wings was a walled garden dazzling wi

hiTwf0rd led Martin through the low cool hall and intro¬
duced him to five great sons and to his mother, . who, _ since his
wife’s death, ten years ago, had been mistress of the house.

384

ARROWS MITH

“Have tea?” said Twyford. “Our American guest will be
down in a moment.”

He would not have thought of saying it, but he had sworn
that since for generations Twyfords had drunk tea here at a
seemly hour, no panic should prevent their going on drinking it
at that hour.

When Martin came into the garden, when he saw the old
silver on the wicker table and heard the quiet voices, the
plague seemed conquered, and he realized that, four thousand
miles southwest of the Lizard, he was in England.

They were seated, pleasant but not too comfortable, when
the American guest came down and from the door stared at
Martin as strangely as he stared in turn.

He beheld a woman who must be his sister. She was perhaps
thirty to his thirty-seven, but in her slenderness, her paleness,
her black brows and dusky hair, she was his twin; she was
his self enchanted.

He could hear his voice croaking, “But you’re my sister!”
and she opened her lips, yet neither of them spoke as they
bowed at introduction. When she sat down, Martin had never
been so conscious of a woman’s presence.

He learned, before evening, that she was Joyce Lanyon,
widow of Roger Lanyon of New York. She had come to St.
Hubert to see her plantations and had been trapped by the
quarantine. He had tentatively heard of her dead husband as
a young man of wealth and family; he seemed to remember
having seen in Vanity Fair a picture of the Lanyons at Palm
Beach.

She talked only of the weather, the flowers, but there was a
rising gaiety in her which stirred even the dour Cecil Twyford.
In the midst of her debonair insults to the hugest of the huge
sons, Martin turned on her:

“You are my sister!”

“Obviously. Well, since you’re a scientist — Are you a good
scientist?”

“Pretty good.”

“I’ve met your Mrs. McGurk. And Dr. Rippleton Hola-
bird. Met ’em in Hessian Hook. You know it, don’t you?”

“No, I — Oh, I’ve heard of it.”

“You know. It’s that renovated old part of Brooklyn where
writers and economists and all those people, some of them al¬
most as good as the very best, consort with people who are

385

ARROWS MITH

almost as smart as the very smartest You know. Where they
dress for dinner but all of them have heard about James
Joyce. Dr. Holabird is frightfully charming, don t you think?

“Why — ” 1 • • i j.

“Tell me. I really mean it. Cecil has been explaining wna

you plan to do experimentally. Could I help you— nursing or
cooking or something— or would I merely be in the way.

“I don’t know yet. If I can use you, 1 11 be unscrupulous

“Oh don’t be earnest like Cecil here, and Dr. Stokes!^ They
have no sense of play. Do you like that man Stokes? Cecil
adores him, and I suppose he’s simply infested mth virtues, .but
I find him so dry and thin and unappetizing. Don t you think.

he might be a little gayer?” . , , , ■>.

Martin gave up all chance of knowing her as he hurle
“Look here! You said you found Holabird charming. It
makes me tired to have you fall for his scientific tripe and no
appreciate Stokes. Stokes is hard— thank God!— ana probab y
h/s rude Why not? He’s fighting a world that bellows for
fake charm No scientist can go through his grind and not
come out more or less rude. And I tell you ! otote i was born
a researcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude. Wish

you could hear him being rude to me! ,

' Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately

shocked, and the five sons beefily looked n° tHmg a y all w
Martin raged on, trying to convey his vision of the barbarian^
the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science. B J Y
Lanvon’s lovely eyes were kind, and when she spoke she had
lost "something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a diner-out
“Y°r I suppose it’s the difference between me, playing at

beAftearlam“’hTdwSked with her in the garden and
to defend himself against he was not quite sure what, till si

“‘‘My dear man, you’re so apologetic about never being apolo-
setic’ If you really must be my twin brother, do
Wm nr of telling me to go to the devil whenever you want to
I don’t mind. Now about your Gottlieb, who seems to be so
much of an obsession with you
“Obsession! Rats! He — ”

Least oTaU things^Martin desired such another peeping,

386 ARROWSMITH

puerile, irritable restlessness as be had shared with Orchid
Pickerbaugh, but as he went to bed in a room with old prints
and a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere

near him was Joyce Lanyon. # .

He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love
with this desirable and quite useless young woman? (How
lovely her shoulders, above black satin at dinner! She had a
genius of radiant flesh; it made that of most women, even the
fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There was a rosy glow
behind it, as from an inner light.)

Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the
house? (Dear Leora, who was the source of life! Was she
now, off there in Penrith Lodge, missing him, lying awake for

' How could he, even in the crisis of an epidemic, invite the
formal Twyfords to invite Leora? (How honest was he? That
afternoon he had recognized the rigid though kindly code of
the Twyfords, but could he not set it aside by being frankly
an Outlander?)

Suddenly he was out of bed, kneeling, praying to Leora.

CHAPTER XXXV

The plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin’s, but it was
unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official
medical officer of the parish, was able to make plans. He di-
vided the population into two equal parts. One of them,
driven in by Twyford, was injected with plague phage, the

other half was left without. . . .

He began to succeed. He saw far-off India, with its annual
four hundred thousand deaths from plague, saved by his ef¬
forts. He heard Max Gottlieb saying, “Martin, you haf done
your experiment. I am very glat !

The pest attacked the unphaged half of the parish much more
heavily than those who had been treated. There did appear
a case or two among those who had the phage, but among the
others there were ten, then twenty, then thirty daily victims.
These unfortunate cases he treated, giving the phage to alter¬
nate patients, in the somewhat barren almshouse of the parish,
a whitewashed cabin the meaner against its vaulting back¬
ground of banyans and breadfruit trees.

He could never understand Cecil Twyford. Though Twy¬
ford had considered his hands as slaves, though he had, in
his great barony, given them only this barren almhouse, yet he
risked his life now in nursing them, and the lives of all his sons.

Despite Martin’s discouragement, Mrs. Lanyon came down
to cook, and a remarkably good cook she was. She also made
beds; she showed more intelligence than the Twyford men
about disinfecti ig herself; and as she bustled about the rusty
kitchen, in a gingham gown she had borrowed from a maid,
she so disturbed Martin that he forgot to be grutt.

In the evening, while they returned by Twyford’s rattling
little motor to Frangipani Court, Mrs. Lanyon talked to Mar¬
tin as one who had shared his work, but when she had bathed

387

388 ARROWSMITH

and powdered and dressed, he talked to her as one who was
afraid of her. Their bond was their resemblance as brother
and sister. They decided, almost irritably, that they looked
utterly alike, except that her hair was more patent-leather than
his and she lacked his impertinent, cocking eyebrow.

Often Martin returned to his patients at night, but once or
twice Mrs. Lanyon and he fled, as much from the family
stolidity of the Twyfords as from the thought of fever-scorched
patients, to the shore of a rocky lagoon which cut far in from
the sea.

They sat on a cliff, full of the sound of the healing tide.
His brain was hectic with the memory of charts on the white¬
washed broad planks of the almshouse, the sun cracks in the
wall, the puffy terrified faces of black patients, how one of
the Twyford sons had knocked over an ampule of phage, and
how itchingly hot it had been in the ward. But to his intensity
the lagoon breeze was cooling, and cooling the rustling tide.
He perceived that Mrs. Lanyon’s white frock wTas fluttering
about her knees; he realized that she too was strained and
still. He turned somberly toward her, and she cried:

“I’m so frightened, and so lonely! The Twyfords are heroic,
but they’re stone. I’m so marooned!”

He kissed her, and she rested against his shoulder. The
softness of her sleeve was agitating to his hand. But she broke
away with:

“No! You don’t really care a hang about me. Just curious.
Perhaps that’s a good thing for me — to-night.”

He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care
with peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between
him and her fragrance were the hospital cots, a great weari¬
ness, and the still face of Leora. They were silent together,
and when his hand crept to hers they sat unimpassioned, com¬
prehending, free to talk of what they would.

He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the
house, and imagined her soft moving within.

“No,” he raged. “Can’t do it. Joyce — women like her —
one of the million things I’ve given up for work and for Lee.
Well. That’s all there is to it then. But if I were here two
weeks — Fool! She’d be furious if you knocked! But — ”

He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the
more aware of it as he turned his back and tramped to his
room.

ARROWSMITH

389

The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest fea¬
ture of the island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge
the port-doctor had cheerfully been wont to get his calls
through a neighbor. The central was now demoralized by the
plague, and when for two hours Martin had tried to have Leora
summoned, he gave up.

But he had triumphed. In three or four days he would
drive to Penrith Lodge. Twyford had blankly assented to his
suggestion that Leora be invited hither, and if she and Joyce
Lanyon should become such friends that Joyce would never
again turn to him in loneliness, he was willing, he was eager
he was almost eager.

When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high
on the Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been
so little apart since he had first come on her, scrubbing a hos¬
pital room in Zenith.

The afternoon was unending; each time she heard a creak¬
ing she roused with the hope that it was his step, and realized
that he would not be coming, all the blank evening, the terrify¬
ing night; would not be here anywhere, not his voice nor the

touch of his hand. , . a

Dinner was mournful. Often enough she had dined alone

when Martin was at the Institute, but then he had been return¬
ing to her some time before dawn — probably and she had re-
flectivelv munched a snack on the corner of the kitchen table,
looking at the funnies in the evening paper. To-night she had
to live up to the butler, who served her as though she were a

dinner-party of twenty. , ,

She sat on the porch, staring at the shadowy roofs of Black-
water below, sure that she felt a “miasm” writhing up through

the hot darkness. , , ,, .

She knew the direction of St. Swithm’s Parish— beyond that
delicate glimmer of lights from palm huts coiling up the hills.
She concentrated on it, wondering if by some magic she might
not have a signal from him, but she could get no feeling of his
looking toward her. She sat long and quiet. . . . She had
nothing to do.

39o ARROWSMITH

Her night was sleepless. She tried to read in bed, by an
electric globe inside the misty little tent of the mosquito-net¬
ting but there was a tear in the netting and the mosquitoes
crept through. As she turned out the light and lay tense, un¬
able to give herself over to sleep, unable to sink into security,
while to her blurred eyes the half-seen folds of the mosquito
netting seemed to slide about her, she tried to remember
whether these mosquitoes might be carrying plague germs. She
realized how much she had depended on Martin for such bits
of knowledge, as for all philosophy. She recalled how annoyed
he had been because she could not remember whether the yel¬
low fever mosquito was Anopheles or Stegomyia — or was it
Aides? — and suddenly she laughed in the night.

She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another
injection of phage.

“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that to-mor¬
row.” .

“Do that t’morrow — do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain,
an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over
sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his
arms.

Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself an¬
other injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort
to comfort them brought out the news that Oliver Marchand,
the doctor on whom they depended, was dead.

In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been
taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Black-
water to make arrangements for his nieces. He did not re¬
turn; no one ever learned what had become of him.

Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line
were closing in on her, she fled into Martin’s laboratory. It
seemed filled with his jerky brimming presence. She kept
away from the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, be¬
cause it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.

Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning,
fumbling at dusting — here in the laboratory meant as a fortress
against disease — a maid had knocked over a test-tube, which
had trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but in it there
were enough plague germs to kill a regiment.

Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that
she thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and
fleeing to Martin, she woke with a fever, a headache, her

ARRO WSMITH

39i

limbs chilly. When the maids discovered her in the morning,
they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed round her,
she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.

All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay
longing for some one to help her. Once she crawled to the
kitchen for water. The floor of the bedroom was an endless
heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen
door she dropped and lay for an hour, whimpering.

“Got to — got to — can’t remember what it was,” her voice
kept appealing to her cloudy brain.

Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about
her a shabby cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in
flight, and in the darkness staggered out to find help. As she
came' to the highway she stumbled, and lay under the hedge,
unmoving, like a hurt animal. On hands and knees she
crawled back into the Lodge, and between times, as her brain
went dark, she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for
Martin.

She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on
her long journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened
for him — listened — tense with listening.

“You will come! I know you’ll come and help me! I
know. You’ll come! Martin! Sandy! Sandy!” she sobbed.

Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no
more pain, and all the shadowy house was quiet but for her
hoarse and struggling breath.

Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to
give the phage to everybody.

“I’m getting to be good and stern, with all you people after
me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if
they tried to lynch me,” he boasted.

He had explained Leora to Joyce. _ ,

“I don’t know whether you two will like each other. You re
so darn’ different. You’re awfully articulate, and you like
these 'pretty people’ that you’re always talking about, but she
doesn’t care a hang for ’em. She sits back— oh, she never
misses anything, but she never says much. Still, she s got the
best instinct for honesty that I’ve ever known. I hope you
two’ll get each other. I was afraid to let her come here —

392 ARROWSMITH

didn’t know what I’d find— but now I’m going to hustle to
Penrith and bring her here to-day.”

He borrowed Twy ford’s car and drove to Blackwater, up to
Penrith, in excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could
have a lively time in the evenings. One of the Twy ford sons
was not so solemn; he and Joyce, with Martin and Leora, could
slip down to the lagoon for picnic suppers; they would sing

He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, “Lee! Leora! Come
on! Here we are!”

The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and
dusty, and the front door was banging. His voice echoed in a
desperate silence. He was uneasy. He darted in, found no one
in the living-room, the kitchen, then hastened into their bed¬
room.

On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting,
was Leora’s body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he
shook her, he stood weeping.

He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make
her understand that he had loved her, and had left her here
only for her safety —

There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp
down raw full glasses. They did not affect him.

By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy gar¬
den looking toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her
light stiff body, kissed it, and laid it in the pit. All night he
wandered. When he came back to the house and saw the row
of her little dresses with the lines of her soft body in them,
he was terrified.

Then he went to pieces.

He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford’s, and moved into
a room behind the Surgeon General’s office. Beside his cot
there was always a bottle.

Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he
raged, “Oh, damn experimentation!” and, despite Stokes’s dis¬
may, he gave the phage to every one who asked.

Only in St. Swithin’s, since there his experiment was so ex¬
cellently begun, did some remnant of honor keep him from dis¬
tributing the phage universally; but the conduct of this experi¬
ment he turned over to Stokes.

Stokes saw that he was a little mad, but only once, when
Martin snarled, “What do I care for your science?” did he try
to hold Martin to his test.

ARRO WSMITH

393

Stokes himself, with Twyford, carried on the experiment and
kept the notes Martin should have kept. By evening, after
working fourteen or fifteen hours since dawn, Stokes would
hasten to St. Swithin’s by motor-cycle — he hated the joggling
and the lack of dignity and he found it somewhat dangerous
to take curving hill-roads at sixty miles an hour, but this was
the quickest way, and till midnight he conferred with Twyford,
gave him orders for the next day, arranged his clumsy annota¬
tions, and marveled at his grim meekness.

Meantime, all day, Martin injected a line of frightened citi¬
zens, in the Surgeon General’s office in Blackwater. Stokes
begged him at least to turn the work over to another doctor
and take what interest he could in St. Swithin’s, but Martin
had a bitter satisfaction in throwing away all his significance,
in helping to wreck his own purposes.

With a nurse for assistant, he stood in the bare office. File
on file of people, black, white, Hindu, stood in an agitated cue
a block long, ten deep, waiting dumbly, as for death. They
crept up to the nurse beside Martin and in embarrassment
exposed their arms, which she scrubbed with soap and water
and dabbled with alcohol before passing them on to him. He
brusquelv pinched up the skin of the upper arm and jabbed
it with the needle of the syringe, cursing at them for jerking,
never seeing their individual faces. As they left him they flut¬
tered with gratitude — “Oh, may God bless you, Doctor! —

but he did not hear. _ .

Sometimes Stokes was there, looking anxious, particularly
when in the cue he saw plantation-hands from St. Swithms,
who were supposed to remain in their parish under strict
control, to test the value of the phage. Sometimes Sir Robert
Fairlamb came down to beam and gurgle and offer his aid.

Lady Fairlamb had been injected first of all, and next to
her a tattered kitchen wench, profuse with Hallelujah’s.

After a fortnight when he was tired of the drama, he had
four doctors making the injections, while he manufactured

^ B^ut by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily,
living on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his
body by hatred as once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy.
His life was as unreal as the nights of an old drunkard. He
had an advantage over normal cautious humanity in not caring
whether he lived or died, he who sat with the dead, talking

394 ARROWSMITH

to Leora and Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver Marchand,
to Inchcape Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with
lifted appealing hands.

After Leora’s death he had returned to Twyford’s but once,
to fetch his baggage, and he had not seen Joyce Lanyon. He
hated her. He swore that it was not her presence which had
kept him from returning earlier to Leora, but he was aware
that while he had been chattering with Joyce, Leora had
been dying.

“Damn’ glib society climber! Thank God I’ll never see
her again!”

He sat on the edge of his cot, in the constricted and airless,
room, his hair ruffled, his eyes blotched with red, a stray alley
kitten, which he esteemed his only friend, asleep on his pillow.
At a knock he muttered, “I can’t talk to Stokes now. Let
him do his own experiments. Sick of experiments! ”

Sulkily, “Oh, come in!”

The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure.

“What do you want?” he grunted.

She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straight¬
ened the litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table.
She coaxed the indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow,
and sat by him on the frowsy cot. Then:

“Please! I know what’s happened. Cecil is in town for an
hour and I wanted to bring — Won’t it comfort you a little
if you know how fond we are of you? Won’t you let me offer
you friendship?”

“I don’t want anybody’s friendship. I haven’t any friends!”

He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he
felt a shiver of new courage.

He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky,
and he could see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection
of all who came begging for it, but he turned both injection
and manufacture over to others, and went back to the most
rigid observation of his experiment in St. Swithin’s . . .
blotted as it now was by the unphaged portion of the parish
going in to Blackwater to receive the phage.

He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most
evenings now he was sober.

ARROW SMITH

395

The gospel of rat-extermination had spread through the
island; everybody from five-year-old to hobbling grandam was
out shooting rats and ground squirrels. Whether from phage
or rat-killing or Providence, the epidemic paused, and six
months after Martin’s coming, when the West Indian May was
broiling and the season of hurricanes was threatened, the
plague had almost vanished and the quarantine was lifted.

St. Hubert felt safe in its kitchens and shops, and amid the
roaring spring the island rejoiced as a sick man first delivered
from pain rejoices at merely living and being at peace.

That chaffering should be abusive and loud in the public
market, that lovers should stroll unconscious of all save them¬
selves, that loafers should tell stories and drink long drinks at
the Ice House, that old men should squat cacking in the shade
of the mangoes, that congregations should sing together to the
Lord — this was no longer ordinary to them nor stupid, but
the bliss of paradise.

They made a festival of the first steamer’s leaving. White
and black, Hindu and Chink and Caribbee, they crowded the
wharf, shouting, waving scarfs, trying not to weep at the feeble
piping of what was left of the Blackwater Gold Medal Band;
and as the steamer, the St. Ia of the McGurk Line, was warped
out, with her captain at the rail of the bridge, very straight,
saluting them with a flourish but his eyes so wet that he could
not see the harbor, they felt that they were no longer jailed
lepers but a part of the free world.

On that steamer Joyce Lanyon sailed. Martin said good-by
to her at the wharf.

Strong of hand, almost as tall as he, she looked at him with¬
out flutter, and rejoiced, “You’ve come through. So have I.
Both of us have been mad, trapped here the way we’ve been.
I don’t suppose I helped you, but I did try. You see, I d
never been trained in reality. You trained me. Good-by.’

“Mayn’t I come to see you in New York?”

“If you’d really like to.”

She was gone, yet she had never been so much with him as
through that tedious hour when the steamer was lost beyond
the horizon, a line edged with silver wire. # But that night in
panic he fled up to Penrith Lodge and buried his cheek in the
damp soil above the Leora with whom he had never had to

ARROWSMITH

396

fence and explain, to whom he had never needed to say,
“Mayn’t I come to see you?”

But Leora, cold in her last bed, unsmiling, did not answer
him nor comfort him.

VII

Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of
his phage experiment; add the observation of Stokes and
Twyford to his own first precise figures.

As the giver of phage to some thousands of frightened
islanders, he had become a dignitary. He was called, in the
first issue of the Blackwater Guardian after the quarantine
was raised, “the savior of all our lives.” He was the universal
hero. If Sondelius had helped to cleanse them, had Sondelius
not been his lieutenant? If it was the intervention of the
Lord, as the earnest old negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in
the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not
the Lord surely sent him?

No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic
through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been
known to slacken and cease without phage.

When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from
the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was “feeling seedy,” that he
had resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimen¬
tation, and was now at home, resting. Holabird himself had
been appointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such
he chanted:

The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk’s agents
which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to
us apprize us far more than does your own modest report what a
really sensational success you have had. You have done what few
other men living could do, both established the value of bacterio¬
phage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most of the
unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees and I are properly
appreciative of the glory which you have added, and still more will
add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk Insti¬
tute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be
unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of
establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.

“Established the value — rats! I about half made the tests,”
sighed Martin, and: “Department! I’ve given too many

ARROWSMITH 397

orders here. Sick of authority. I want to get back to my
lab and start all over again.”

It came to him that now he would probably have ten thou¬
sand a year. . . . Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant
dinners.

Though he had watched Gottlieb declining, it was a shock
that he could be so unwell as to drop his work even for a few
months.

He forgot his own self as it came to him that in giving up
his experiment, playing the savior, he had been a traitor to
Gottlieb and all that Gottlieb represented. When he returned
to New York he would have to call on the old man and admit
to him, to those sunken relentless eyes, that he did not have
complete proof of the value of the phage.

If he could have run to Leora with his ten thousand a
year —

VIII

He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon.

The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert
Fairlamb in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While
Sir Robert ruddily blurted compliments and Kellett tried to
explain things, and all of them drank to him, standing, after
the toast to the King, Martin sat lonely, considering that to¬
morrow he would leave these trusting eyes and face the harsh
demands of Gottlieb, of Terry Wickett.

The more they shouted his glory, the more he thought about
what unknown, tight-minded scientists in distant laboratories
would say of a man who had had his chance and cast it away.
The more they called him the giver of life, the more he felt
himself disgraced and a traitor; and as he looked at Stokes he
saw in his regard a pity worse than condemnation.

CHAPTER XXXVI

It happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had
come, on the St. Buryan. The ship was haunted with the
phantoms of Leora dreaming, of Sondelius shouting on the
bridge.

And on the St. Buryan was the country-club Miss Gwilliam
who had offended Sondelius.

She had spent the winter importantly making notes on
native music in Trinidad and Caracas; at least in planning to
make notes. She saw Martin come aboard at Blackwater, and
pertly noted the friends who saw him off — two* Englishmen,
one puffy, one rangy, and a dry-looking Scotsman.

“Your friends all seem to be British,” she enlightened him,
when she had claimed him as an old friend.

“Yes.”

“You’ve spent the winter here.”

“Yes.”

“Hard luck to be caught by the quarantine. But I told you
you were silly to go ashore! You must have managed to pick
up quite a little money practising. But it must have been
unpleasant, really.”

“Ye-es, I suppose it was.”

“I told you it would be! You ought to have come on to
Trinidad. Such a fascinating island! And tell me, how is the
Roughneck?”

“Who?”

“Oh, you know — that funny Swede that used to dance and
everything.”

“He is dead.”

“Oh, I am sorry. You know, no matter what the others said,
I never thought he was so bad. I’m sure he had quite a nice
cultured mind, when he wasn’t carousing around. Your wife
isn’t with you, is she?”

“No — she isn’t with me. I must go down and unpack now.”

398

ARROW SMITH

399

Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which
said that the least people could do was to learn some manners.

With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few
first-class passengers on the St. Buryan, and most of these did
not count, because they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists
but merely South Americans. As tourists do when their minds
have been broadened and enriched by travel, when they return
to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent
a whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the
respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and
noted the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day
trudged round the deck, who after midnight was seen standing
by himself at the rail.

“That guy looks awful’ restless to me!” said Mr. S. San¬
born Hibble of Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Mem¬
phis, and she answered, with the wit which made her so popu¬
lar wherever she went, “Yes, don’t he. I reckon he must be in
love!”

“Oh, I know him!” said Miss Gwilliam. “He and his wife
were on the St. Buryan when I came down. She’s in New
York now. He’s some kind of a doctor — not awful’ successful
I don’t believe. Just between ourselves, I don’t think much of
him or of her either. They sat and looked stupid all the way
down.”

Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He
knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration
and Large Affairs.

As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself.
Angrily he pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at
whatever final report he might make. For a time he hated
the criticism of his fellow laboratory-grinds as he had hated
their competition; he hated the need of forever looking over
his shoulder at pursuers. But on a night when he stood at
the rail for hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their
criticism, and afraid because his experiment had so many loop¬
holes. He hurled overboard all the polemics with which he had

ARROWS MIT H

400

protected himself : “Men who never have had the experience of
trying, in the midst of an epidemic, to remain calm and keep
experimental conditions, do not realize in the security of their
laboratories what one has to contend with.”

Constant criticism was good, if only it was not spiteful, jeal¬
ous, petty —

No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what
easy-going workers called “spiteful.” To them the joyous spite
of crushing the almost-good was more natural than creation.
Why should a great house-wrecker, who could clear the cum¬
bered ground, be set at trying to lay brick?

“All right!” he rejoiced. “Let ’em come! Maybe I’ll an¬
ticipate ’em and publish a roast of my own work. I have got
something, from the St. Swithin test, even if I did let things
slide for a while. I’ll take my tables to a biometrician. He
may rip ’em up. Good! What’s left, I’ll publish.”

He went to bed feeling that he could face the eyes of Gott¬
lieb and Terry, and for the first time in weeks he slept without
terror.

At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight
indignation of Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and
Mrs. Dawson, Martin was greeted by reporters who agree¬
ably though vaguely desired to know what were these remark¬
able things he had been doing to some disease or other, in
some island some place.

He was rescued from them by Rippleton Holabird, who burst
through them with his hands out, crying, “Oh, my dear fellow!
We know all that’s happened. We grieve for you so, and we’re
so glad you were spared to come back to us.”

Whatever Martin might, under the shadow of Max Gottlieb,
have said about Holabird, now he wrung his hands and mut¬
tered, “It’s good to be home.”

Holabird (he was wearing a blue shirt with a starched blue
collar, like an actor) could not wait till Martin’s baggage had
gone through the customs. He had to return to his duties as
Acting Director of the Institute. He delayed only to hint that
the Board of Trustees were going to make him full Director,
and that certainly, my dear fellow, he would 9ee that Martin
had the credit and the reward he deserved.

ARRO WSMITH

401

When Holabird was gone, driving away in his neat coupe
(he often explained that his wife and he could afford a chauf¬
feur, but they preferred to spend the money on other things),
Martin was conscious of Terry Wickett, leaning against a
gnawed wooden pillar of the wharf-house, as though he had been
there for hours.

Terry strolled up and snorted, “Hello, Slim. All O. K.?
Lez shoot the stuff through the customs. Great pleasure to see
the Director and you kissing.”

As they drove through the summer-walled streets of Brook-
13m, Martin inquired, “How’s Holabird working out as Direc¬
tor? And how is Gottlieb?”

“Oh, the Holy Wren is no worse than Tubbs; he’s even
politer and more ignorant. . . . Me, you watch me! One of
these days I’m going off to the woods — got a shack in Vermont
— going to work there without having to produce results for
the Director! They’ve stuck me in the Department of Bio¬
chemistry. And Gottlieb — ” Terry’s voice became anxious.
“I guess he’s pretty shaky — They’ve pensioned him off.
Now look, Slim: I hear you’re going to be a gilded department-
head, and I’ll never be anything but an associate member. Are
you going on with me, or are you going to be one of the Holy
Wren’s pets — hero-scientist?”

“I’m with you, Terry, you old grouch.” Martin dropped
the cynicism which had always seemed proper between him
and Terry. “I haven’t got anybody else. Leora and Gustaf
are gone and now maybe Gottlieb. You and I have got to
stick together!”

“It’s a go!”

They shook hands, they coughed gruffly, and talked of straw
hats.

When Martin entered the Institute, his colleagues galloped
up to shake hands and to exclaim, and if their praise was flus¬
tering, there is no time at which one can stomach so much of
it as at home-coming.

Sir Robert Fairlamb had written to the Institute a letter
glorifying him. The letter arrived on the same boat with
Martin, and next day Holabird gave it out to the press.

The reporters, who had been only a little interested at his

402

ARRO WSMITH

landing, came around for interviews, and while Martin was
sulky and jerky Holabird took them in hand, so that the papers
were able to announce that America, which was always rescu¬
ing the world from something or other, had gone and done it
again. It was spread in the prints that Dr. Martin Arrowsmith
was not only a powerful witch-doctor and possibly something
of a laboratory-hand, but also a ferocious rat-killer, village-
burner, Special Board addresser, and snatcher from death.
There was at the time, in certain places, a doubt as to how
benevolent the United States had been to its Little Brothers —
Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua — and the editors and politi¬
cians were grateful to Martin for this proof of their sacrifice
and tender watchfulness.

He had letters from the Public Health service; from an en¬
terprising Midwestern college which desired to make him a
Doctor of Civil Law; from medical schools and societies which
begged him to address them. Editorials on his work appeared
in the medical journals and the newspapers; and Congressman
Almus Pickerbaugh telegraphed him from Washington, in what
the Congressman may conceivably have regarded as verse:
“They got to go some to get ahead of fellows that come from
old Nautilus.” And he was again invited to dinner at the
McGurks’, not by Capitola but by Ross McGurk, whose name
had never had such a whitewashing.

He refused all invitations to speak, and the urgent organiza¬
tions which had invited him responded with meekness that they
understood how intimidatingly busy Dr. Arrowsmith was, and
if he ever could find the time, they would be most highly
honored —

Rippleton Holabird was elected full Director now, in suc¬
cession to Gottlieb, and he sought to use Martin as the prize
exhibit of the Institute. He brought all the visiting dignitaries,
all the foreign Men of Measured Merriment, in to see him, and
they looked pleased and tried to think up questions. Then
Martin was made head of the new Department of Microbiology
at twice his old salary.

_ He never did learn what was the difference between micro¬
biology and bacteriology. But none of his glorification could he
resist. He was still too dazed — he was the more dazed when
he had seen Max Gottlieb.

ARROWSMITH

403

The morning after his return he had telephoned to Gott¬
lieb’s flat, had spoken to Miriam and received permission to
call in the late afternoon.

All the way up-town he could hear Gottlieb saying, “You
were my son! I gave you eferyt’ing I knew of truth and
honor, and you haf betrayed me. Get out of my sight!”

Miriam met him in the hall, fretting, “I don’t know if I
should have let you come at all, Doctor.”

“Why? Isn’t he well enough to see people?”

“It isn’t that. He doesn’t really seem ill, except that he’s
feeble, but he doesn’t know any one. The doctors say it’s senile
dementia. His memory is gone. And he’s just suddenly for¬
gotten all his English. He can only speak German, and I can’t
speak it, hardly at all. If I’d only studied it, instead of
music! But perhaps it may do him good to have you here.
He was always so fond of you. You don’t know how he talked
of you and the splendid experiment you’ve been doing in
St. Hubert.”

“Well, I — ” He could find nothing to say.

Miriam led him into a room whose walls were dark with
books. Gottlieb was sunk in a worn chair, his thin hand lax on
the arm.

“Doctor, it’s Arrowsmith, just got back!” Martin mumbled.

The old man looked as though he half understood ; he peered
at him, then shook his head and whimpered, “V erst eh’ nickt.”
His arrogant eyes were clouded with ungovernable slow tears.

Martin understood that never could he be punished now and
cleansed. Gottlieb had sunk into his darkness still trusting
him.

Martin closed his flat — their flat — with a cold swift fury,
lest he yield to his misery in finding among Leora’s possessions
a thousand fragments which brought her back: the frock she
had bought for Capitola McGurk’s dinner, a petrified chocolate
she had hidden away to munch illegally by night, a memoran¬
dum, “Get almonds for Sandy.” He took a grimly impersonal
room in a hotel, and sunk himself in work. There was noth¬
ing for him but work and the harsh friendship of Terry Wickett.

404

ARROWSMITH

His first task was to check the statistics of his St. Swithin
treatments and the new figures still coming in from Stokes.
Some of them were shaky, some suggested that the value, of
phage certainly had been confirmed, but there was nothing
final. He took his figures to Raymond Pearl the biometrician,
who thought less of them than did Martin himself.

He had already made a report of his work to the Director
and the Trustees of the Institute, with no conclusion except
“the results await statistical analysis and should have this
before they are published.” But Holabird had run wild, the
newspapers had reported wonders, and in on Martin poured
demands that he send out phage ; inquiries as to whether he did
not have a phage for tuberculosis, for syphilis; offers that he
take charge of this epidemic and that.

Pearl had pointed out that his agreeable results in first phag-
ing the whole of Carib village must be questioned, because it
was possible that when he began the curve of the disease had
already passed its peak. With this and the other complications,
viewing his hot work in St. Hubert as coldly as though it were
the pretense of a man whom he had never seen, Martin decided
that he had no adequate proof, and strode in to see the Direc¬
tor.

Holabird was gentle and pretty, but he sighed that if this
conclusion wrere published, he would have to take back all the
things he had said about the magnificence which, presumably,
he had inspired his subordinate to accomplish. He was gentle
and pretty, but firm; Martin was to suppress (Holabird did
not say “suppress” — he said “leave to me for further consid¬
eration”) the real statistical results, and issue the report
with an ambiguous summary.

Martin was furious, Plolabird delicately relentless. Martin
hastened to Terry, declaring that he would resign — would de¬
nounce — would expose — Yes! He would! He no longer had
to support Leora. He’d work as a drug-clerk. He’d go back
right now and tell the Holy Wren —

“Hey! Slim! Wait a minute! Hold your horses!” observed
Terry. “Just get along with Holy for a while, and we’ll work
out something we can do together, and be independent. Mean¬
while you have got your lab here, and you still have some
physical chemistry to learn! And, uh— Slim, I haven’t said
anything about your St. Hubert stuff, but you know and I know
you bunged it up badly. Can you come into court with clean

ARROWS M ITH

405

hands, if you’re going to indict the Holy One? Though I do
agree that aside from being a dirty, lying, social-climbing,
sneaking, power-grabbing hypocrite, he’s all right. Hold on.
We’ll fix up something. Why, son, we’ve just been learning our
science; we’re just beginning to work.”

Then Holabird published officially, under the Institute’s
seal, Martin’s original report to the Trustees, with such quaint
revisions as a change of “the results should have analysis” to
“while statistical analysis would seem desirable, it is evident
that this new treatment has accomplished all that had been
hoped.”

Again Martin went mad, again Terry calmed him; and with
a hard fury unlike his eagerness of the days when he had known
that Leora was waiting for him he resumed his physical
chemistry.

He learned the involved mysteries of freezing-point deter¬
minations, osmotic pressure determinations, and tried to apply
Northrop ’s generalizations on enzymes to the study of phage.

He became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely
predicted natural phenomena; his world was cold, exact, aus¬
terely materialistic, bitter to those who founded their logic on
impressions. He was daily more scornful toward the counters
of paving stones, the renamers of species, the compilers of ir¬
relevant data. In his absorption the pleasant seasons passed
unseen.

Once he raised his head in astonishment to perceive that it
was spring; once Terry and he tramped two hundred miles
through the Pennsylvania hills, by summer roads; but it
seemed only a day later when it was Christmas, and Holabird
was being ever so jolly and yuley about the Institute.

The absence of Gottlieb may have been good for Martin,
since he no longer turned to the master for solutions in tough
queries. When he took up diffusion problems, he began to
develop his own apparatus, and whether it was from inborn
ingenuity or merely from a fury of labor, he was so competent
that he won from Terry the almost overwhelming praise:
“Why, that’s not so darn’ bad, Slim!”

The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born
came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He
desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and
provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to “burn with
a hard gem-like flame,” and he desired not to have ease and

ARROWSMITH

406

repute in the market-place, but rather to keep free of those
follies, lest they confuse him and make him soft.

Holabird was as much bewildered as Tubbs would have been
by the ramifications of Martin’s work. What did he think he
was anyway — a bacteriologist or a bio-physicist? But Hola¬
bird was won by the scientific world’s reception of Martin’s
first important paper, on the effect of X-rays, gamma rays, and
beta rays on the anti-Shiga phage. It was praised in Paris and
Brussels and Cambridge as much as in New York, for its in¬
sight and for “the clarity and to perhaps be unscientifically
enthusiastic, the sheer delight and style of its presentation,” as
Professor Berkeley Wurtz put it; which may be indicated by
quoting the first paragraph of the paper:

In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked qualitative
destructive effect of the radiations from radium emanations on Bac-
teriophage-anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is shown that X-rays,
gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical inactivating effects on
this bacteriophage. Furthermore, a quantitative relation is demon¬
strated to exist between this inactivation and the radiations that pro¬
duce it. The results obtained from this quantitative study permit
the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by
determining the units of bacteriophage remaining after irradiation by
gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a func¬
tion of the two variables, millicuries and hours. The following equa¬
tion accounts quantitatively for the experimental results obtained:

X log e —
jr _ -- u

k-e0 (.-Xtx)

When Director Holabird saw the paper — Yeo was vicious
enough to take it in and ask his opinion — he said, “Splendid,
oh, I say, simply splendid! I’ve just had the chance to skim
through it, old boy, but I shall certainly read it carefully, the
first free moment I have.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return
to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could
not come, and he did not hear from her again.

His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not
content him when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced
from Dr. Arrowsmith to a man who had no one to talk to.
He remembered how they had sat by the lagoon in the tepid
twilight; he telephoned asking whether he might come in for
tea.

He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but
after seeing her in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St.
Swithin’s almshouse, he did not grasp her position ; and he was
uncomfortable when, feeling dusty from the laboratory, he came
to her great house and found her the soft-voiced mistress of
many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces, whether they
are such very little ones as Joyce’s, with its eighteen rooms, or
Buckingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are
choked with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete
that one does not remember small endearing charms, they are
indistinguishable in their common feeling of polite and uneasy
grandeur, they are therefore altogether tedious.

But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had
accumulated, Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that
she enjoyed showing Martin what she really was, by producing
footmen and too many kinds of sandwiches, and by boasting,
“Oh, I never do know what they’re going to give me for tea.”

But she had welcomed him, crying, “You look so much bet¬
ter. I’m frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a
good cook at the almshouse, wasn’t I!”

Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been
greatly interested. She knew too many men who were witty
and well-bred, ivory smooth and competent to help her spend
the four or five million dollars with which she was burdened.
But Martin was at once a scholar who made osmotic pressure

407

4o8 ARROWSMITH

determinations almost interesting, a taut swift man whom
she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely young¬
ster who naively believed that here in her soft security she was
still the girl who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the
courageous woman who had cGme to him in a drunken room at
Blackwater.

Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more
to her than to his own articulateness, he made living the Insti¬
tute, the members, their feuds, and the drama of coursing on
the trail of a discovery.

Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St.
Hubert, and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found
exhilaration.

He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the
ways of her house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent
of her friends. He liked — and possibly he was liked by — some
of them. With one friend of hers Martin had a state of unde¬
clared war. This was Latham Ireland, an achingly well-dressed
man of fifty, a competent lawyer who was fond of standing in
front of fireplaces and being quietly clever. He fascinated Joyce
by telling her that she was subtle, then telling her what she
was being subtle about.

Martin hated him.

In midsummer Martin wTas invited for a week-end at Joyce’s
vast blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half
apologetic for its luxury; he was altogether unhappy.

The strain of considering clothes, of galloping out to buy
white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the
constant-temperature bath, of trying to look easy in the limou¬
sine which met him at the station, and of deciding which
servants to tip and how much and when, was dismaying to a
simple man. He felt rustic when, after he had blurted, “Just
a minute till I go up and unpack my suit-case,” she said
gently, “Oh, that will have been done for you.”

He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on,
that first evening, all the small store of underclothes he had
brought, and had squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of tooth¬
paste.

He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, “This is too rich for
my blood!”

He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes,
putting them in places where they could not be found, then

ARRO WSMITH

409

popping in menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the
enormous room looking for them.

But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do.
He had no sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play
with these chattering unidentified people who filled the house
and, apparently with perfect willingness, worked at golf and
bridge. He had met but few of the friends of whom they
talked. They said, “You know dear old R. G.,” and he said,
“Oh, yes,” but he never did know dear old R. G.

Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea,
and she found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse
than his own, but she had twenty guests — forty at Sunday lunch
— and he gave up certain agreeable notions of walking with
her in fresh lanes and, after excitedly saying this and that, per¬
haps kissing her. He had one moment with her. As he was
going, she ordered, “Come here, Martin,” and led him apart.

“You haven’t really enjoyed it.”

“Why, sure, course I — ”

“Of course you haven’t! And you despise us, rather, and
perhaps you’re partly right. I do like pretty people and gra¬
cious manners and good games, but I suppose they seem
piffling after nights in a laboratory.”

“No, I like ’em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful
women— at you! But — Oh, darn it, Joyce, I’m not up to it.
I’ve always been poor, and horribly busy. I haven’t learned
your games.”

“But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into
everything.”

“Even getting drunk in Blackwater!”

“And I hope in New York, too! Dear R.oger, he did have
such an innocent, satisfying time getting drunk at class-din¬
ners! But I mean: if you went at it, you could play bridge and
golf — and talking— better than any of them. If you only knew
how frightfully recent most of the ducal class in America are!
And Martin: wouldn’t it be good for you? Wouldn’t you work
all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now
and then? And are you going to admit there’s anything you
can’t conquer?”

“No, I—”

“Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and
we’ll fight it out?”

“Be glad to.”

410 ARROWSMITH

For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett’s vaca¬
tion place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he
loved Joyce Lanyon, and that he was going to attack the art
of being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ar¬
dently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in a stale Pull¬
man chair-car with his feet up on his suit-case, he pictured him¬
self wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie. and
the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining
about dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old
Latham Ireland’s aged Rolls-Royce.

But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud
proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples,, and
heard Terry’s real theories of the decomposition of quinine
derivatives.

Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry
had named his place “Birdies’ Rest.” He owned five acres of
woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was
a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for
table-linen.

“Here’s the layout, Slim,” said Terry. “Some day I’m going
to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing
sera or something, and I’ll put up a couple more buildings on
the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent
place for science — two hours a day on the commercial end,
and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and
telling dirty stories. That leaves — two and six and two make
ten, if I’m any authority on higher math — that leaves fourteen
hours a day for research (except when you got something
special on), with no Director and no Society patrons and no
Trustees that you’ve got to satisfy by making fool reports. Of
course there won’t be any scientific dinners with ladies in candy-
box dresses, but I figure we’ll be able to afford plenty of salt
pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made perfectly —
if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim.”

Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible
plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of
cooking beef-stew with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.

But the first of these was the more novel to him.

ARROWS MITH

411

Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert
experiences and her natural variability had caused her to be
dissatisfied with Roger’s fast-motoring set.

She let the lady Maecenases of her acquaintance beguile
her into several of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she
had enjoyed her active and entirely purposeless war work in
1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some degree an Arranger, which
was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for Capitola Mc-
Gurk.

An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was
not a Capitola; she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke
spaciously, nor did she take out her sex-passion in talking.
She was fine and occasionally gorgeous, with tiger in her,
though she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and black-
lingerie passion as she was from Capitola’s cooing staleness.
Hers wras sheer straight white silk and cherished skin.

Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that
the only time in her life when she had felt useful and independ¬
ent was when she had been an almshouse cook.

She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for
the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante-
lover.

“Joy,” he observed, “there seems to be an astounding quan¬
tity of that Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your
benign uncle — ”

“Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too agres-
sive, thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely
a pedant, and his shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I
shall marry him. I almost think I love him!”

“Wouldn’t cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?” said
Latham Ireland.

What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of
thirty-eight would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken
woman who was attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth,
there was no problem at all. He was no poor man marrying
money! Why, he was making ten thousand a year, which was
eight thousand more than he needed to live on!

412

ARROWS M ITH

Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury.
With tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their
dining in her Jacobean hall of state, she come with him on his
own sort of party. She came, with enthusiasm. They went
to abysmal Greenwich Village restaurants with candles, artistic
waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown dives with food and
nothing else. He even insisted on their taking the subway —
though after dinner he usually forgot that he was being Spar¬
tan, and ordered a taxicab. She accepted it all without either
wincing or too much gurgling.

She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she
taught him bridge, which, with his concentration and his
memory, he soon played better than she and enjoyed aston¬
ishingly; she persuaded him that he had a leg and would look
well in golf clothes.

He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening.
He had a taxi waiting.

“Why don’t we stick to the subway?” she said.

They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive
and quite unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.

“Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows
in my stomach never did help me much to plan experiments.
I expect when we’re married I’ll enjoy your limousine.”

“Is this a proposal? I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry
you. Really, I’m not! You have no sense of ease!”

They were married the following January, in St. George’s
Church, and Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers,
the bishop, the relatives with high-pitched voices, and the top
hat which Joyce had commanded, as he did over having Ripple-
ton Holabird wring his hand with a look of, “At last, dear boy,
you have come out of barbarism and become One of Us.”

Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had
refused, and asserted that only with pain would he come to
the wedding at all. The best man was Dr. William Smith,
with his beard trimmed for the occasion, and distressing morn¬
ing clothes and a topper which he had bought in London eleven
years before, but both of them were safe in charge of a cousin
of Joyce who was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and
to recognize the Wedding March. He had understood that
Martin was Groton and Harvard, and when he discovered that
he was Winnemac and nothing at all, he became suspicious.

In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, “Dear,

ARROW SMITH 40

you were brave! I didn’t know what a damn’ fool that cousin
of mine was. Kiss me ! ”

Thenceforth . . . except for a dreadful second when Leora.
floated between them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her
pale cold breast . . . they were happy and in each other found
adventurous new ways.

For three months they wandered in Europe.

On the first day Joyce had said, “Let’s have this beastly
money thing over. I should think you are the least mercenary
of men. I’ve put ten thousand dollars to your credit in Lon¬
don — oh, yes, and fifty thousand in New York — and if you’d
like, when you have to do things for me, I’d be glad if you’d
draw on it. No! Wait! Can’t you see how easy and decent
I want to make it all? You won’t hurt me to save your own
self-respect?”

They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del
Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton),
Madame des Basses Loges (Miss Brown of San Francisco), and
the Countess of Marazion (who had been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe
of Albany, and several things before that), but Joyce did go
with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris, Copen¬
hagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners re¬
ceived Her Flusband, knew of him, desired to be violent with
him about phage, and showed him their work of years. Some
of them were hasty and graceless, she thought. Her Man was
prettier than any of them, and if she would but be patient with
him, she could make him master polo and clothes and conversa¬
tion . . . but of course go on with his science ... a pity he
could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British
scientists they met. But even in America there were honorary
degrees. • • •

While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered
Women.

ARROWSMITH

Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who
were Nice American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night,
and of Leora who, in her indolence, her indifference to decora¬
tion and good fame, was neither woman nor wife but only
her own self, Martin knew nothing whatever about Women.
He had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his wishes, to
understand without his saying them all the flattering things he
had planned to say. He was spoiled, and Joyce was not tim¬
orous about telling him so.

It was not for her to sit beaming and wordless while he and
his fellow-researchers arranged the world. With many jolts
he perceived that even outside the bedroom he had to consider
the fluctuations and variables of his wife, as A Woman, and
sometimes as A Rich Woman.

It was confusing to find that where Leora had acidly claimed
sex-loyalty but had hummingly not cared in what manner he
might say Good Morning, Joyce was indifferent as to how
many women he might have fondled (so long as he did not
insult her by making love to them in her presence) but did
require him to say Good Morning as though he meant it. It
was confusing to find how starkly she discriminated between
his caresses when he was absorbed in her and his hasty interest
when he wanted to go to sleep. She could, she said, kill a
man who considered her merely convenient furniture, and she
uncomfortably emphasized the “kill.”

She expected him to remember her birthday, her taste in
wine, her liking for flowers, and her objection to viewing the
process of shaving. She wanted a room to herself ; she insisted
that he knock before entering; and she demanded that he ad¬
mire her hats.

When he was so interested in the work at Pasteur Institute
that he had a clerk telephone that he would not be able to meet
her for dinner, she was tight-lipped with rage.

“Oh, you got to expect that,” he reflected, feeling that he
was being tactful and patient and penetrating.

It annoyed him, sometimes, that she would never impulsively
start off on a walk with him. No matter how brief the jaunt,
she must first go to her room for white gloves — placidly stand
there drawing them on. . . . And in London she made him
buy spats . . . and even wear them.

ARROW SMITH

4i5

Joyce was not only an Arranger — she was a Loyalist. Like
most American cosmopolites she revered the English peerage,
adopted all their standards and beliefs — or what she consid¬
ered their standards and beliefs — and treasured her encounters
with them. Three and a half years after the War of 1914-18,
she still said that she loathed all Germans, and the one com¬
plete quarrel between her and Martin occurred when he desired
to see the laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.

But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage.
They loved fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains
and came back to revel in vast bathrooms and ingenious din¬
ners; they idled before cafes, and save when he fell silent as
he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit before cafes
in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of their
minds.

Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved,
Joyce offered to him on generous hands, and he who had ever
been sensitive to warm colors and fine gestures — when he was
not frenzied with work — was grateful to her and boyish with
wonder. He believed that he was learning to take life easily
and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but only to him¬
self) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came
back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to
protect the Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation
about bridge and motors and to osmotic pressure determina¬
tions.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and
whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work
in physiology he had done nothing but arrange a few nicely
selected flowers on the tables hewn out by other men, it was a
satisfaction to him to observe that these rotters came down
to the Institute by subway, while he drove elegantly in his
coupe. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them all,
came by limousine with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and
Holabird’s coffee was salted.

There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that
he did not lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauf¬
feur.

His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to enter¬
tain Angus Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce
them to Director Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons,
and to a medical baronet; and to have Angus gush, “Mart, do
you mind my saying we’re all awfully proud of you? Rounce-
field was speaking to me about it the other day. ‘It may be
presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I really feel that perhaps the
training we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did
in some way contribute to his magnificent work in the West
Indies and at McGurk.’ What a lovely woman your wife is,
old man! Do you suppose she’d mind telling Mrs. Duer where
she got that frock?”

Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury,
but after the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of
helping Leora check the laundry and worry about the price of
steak, after a life of waiting in the slush for trolleys, it was
not at all dismaying to have a valet who produced shirts auto¬
matically; not at all degrading to come to meals which were
always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to lean an
aching head against softness and think how clever he was.

“You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for

416

ARROWS MITH 4*7

you, it saves your own energy for the things that only you can
do,” said Joyce.

Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in
golf.

A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him
to see Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his
brooding to smile on them.

“After all,” Martin considered, “the old man did like beau¬
tiful things. If he’d had the chance, he might’ve liked a big
Establishment, too, maybe.”

Terry was surprisingly complaisant.

“I’ll tell you, Slim — if you want to know. Personally I’d hate
to have to live up to servants. But I’m getting old and wise.

I figure that different folks like different things, and awful’
few of ’em have the sense to come and ask me what they ought
to like. But honest, Slim, I don’t think I’ll come to dinner.
I’ve gone and bought a dress-suit — bought it! — got it in my
room — damn’ landlady keeps filling it with moth-balls — but
I don’t think I could stand listening to Latham Ireland being
clever.”

It was, however, Rippleton Holabird’s attitude which most
concerned Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that
unless he desired to drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich
Woman’s Husband, he would do well to remember who was
Director.

Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for
Ross McGurk, Holabird had developed the remoteness, the in¬
human quiet courtesy, of the Man of Affairs, and people who
presumed on his old glad days he courteously put in their
places. He saw the need of repressing insubordination, when
Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him one week
after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on
him in his laboratory.

“Martin,” he sighed, “I find that our friend Ross McGurk
is just a bit dissatisfied with the practical results that are
coming out of the Institute and, to convince him, I’m afraid I
really must ask you to put less emphasis on bacteriophage for
the moment and take up influenza. The Rockefeller Institute
has the right idea. They’ve utilized their best minds, and
spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia,
meningitis, cancer. They’ve already lessened the terrors of
meningitis and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of

4IS ARROWSMITH

complete abolition through Noguchi’s work, and I have no
doubt that their hospital, with its enormous resources and
splendidly cooperating minds, will be the first to find something
to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand, they’re hot after the
cause of influenza. They’re not going to permit another great
epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it’s up to us to beat them on
the flu, and I’ve chosen you to represent us in the race.”

Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of re¬
producing phage on dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he
could not risk being discharged. He was too rich! Martin the
renegade medical student could flounder off and be a soda-
clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon should indulge in
such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and photo¬
graphed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becom¬
ing merely her supported husband — a butler of the boudoir.

He assented, not very pleasantly.

He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half¬
heartedness almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured
cultures from cases which might be influenza and might be bad
colds — no one was certain just what the influenza symptoms
were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of the work to his
assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions to “put
on another hundred tubes of the A medium — hell, make it
another thousand!” and when he found that they were doing
as they pleased, he was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did
not guiltily turn his hand from the plow it was only because
he never touched the plow. Once his own small laboratory
had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire kitchen. Now
the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with long
racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold,
none of them properly labeled.

Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the
Rockefeller investigators had found the cause of flu. He
gushed in to Holabird and told him so. As for himself, he
was going back to his search for the real nature of phage.

Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird
wanted the McGurk Institute — and the Director of McGurk
Institute — to have the credit for capturing influenza, then it
simply could not be possible that Rockefeller was ahead of
them. He also said weighty things about phage. Its essential
nature, he pointed out, was an academic question.

But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialectician

ARROWS MITH

419

for Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin
gloomily believed) to devise new ways of plaguing him. For a
time Martin was again left free to wallow in work.

He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by
a very complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon
dioxide tension — as exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable
as weighing the stars. His report stirred the laboratory world,
and here and there (in Tokio, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) en¬
thusiasts believed he had proven that phage was a living organ¬
ism; and other enthusiasts said, in esoteric language with
mathematical formulae, that he was a liar and six kinds of a
fool.

It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man,
that he pitched over most of his own work and some of the
duties of being Joyce’s husband to follow Terry Wickett,
which showed that he lacked common sense, because Terry
was still an assistant while he himself was head of a depart¬
ment.

Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when
introduced into the animal body slowly decompose into prod¬
ucts which are highly toxic to bacteria but only mildly toxic
to the body. There was hinted here a whole new world of
therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and invited him to
collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave from
Holabird — and from Joyce — and though it was winter they
went off to Birdies’ Rest, in the Vermont hills. While they
snowshoed and shot rabbits, and all the long dark evenings
while they lay on their bellies before the fire, they ranted
and planned.

Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not
enjoy gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the
snow. It was not unpleasant to be free of thinking up new
compliments for Joyce.

They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do
the quinine derivatives act by attaching themselves to the
bacteria, or by changing the body fluids? It was a simple,
clear, definite question which required for answer only the in¬
most knowledge of chemistry and biology, a few hundred ani¬
mals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty or a
million years of trying and failing.

They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with the
animal which should most nearly reproduce human pneumonia.

420

ARROWSMITH

This meant the monkey, and to murder monkeys is expensive
and rather grim. Holabird, as Director, could supply them,
but if they took him into confidence he would demand im¬
mediate results.

Terry meditated, “ ’Member there was one of these Nobel-
prize winners, Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead
of blowing in the prize spent the whole thing on chimps and
other apes, and he got together with another of those whiskery
old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept the anti-viv
folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the
transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven’t got any
Nobel Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn’t look to me — ”

“Terry, I’ll do it, if necessary! I’ve never sponged on
Joyce yet, but I will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us.”

They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly,
and they demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand
dollars for monkeys. They wished to start a research which
might take two years without apparent results — possibly with¬
out any results. Terry was to be transferred to Martin’s de¬
partment as co-head, their combined salaries shared equally.

Then they prepared to fight.

Holabird stared, assembled his mustache, departed from his
Diligent Director manner, and spoke:

“Wait a minute, if you don’t mind. As I gather it, you are
explaining to me that occasionally it’s necessary to take some
time to elaborate an experiment. I really must tell you that
I was formerly a researcher in an Institute called McGurk,
and learned several of these things all by myself! Hell,
Terry, and you, Mart, don’t be so egotistic! You’re not the
only scientists who like to work undisturbed! If you poor
fish only knew how I long to get away from signing letters
and get my fingers on a kymograph drum again! Those
beautiful long hours of search for truth! And if you knew
how I’ve fought the Trustees for the chance to keep you fel¬
lows^ free ! All right. You shall have your monkeys. Fix up
the joint department to suit yourselves. And work ahead as
seems best. I doubt if in the whole scientific world there’s
two people that can be trusted as much as you two surly
birds!”

ARROWS M IT H

421

Holabird rose, straight and handsome and cordial, his hand
out. They sheepishly shook it and sneaked away, Terry
grumbling, “He’s spoiled my whole day! I haven’t got a
single thing to kick about! Slim, where’s the catch? You
can bet there is one — there always is!”

In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They
had their monkeys, their laboratories and gargons, and their
unbroken leisure; they began the most exciting work they had
ever known, and decidedly the most nerve-jabbing. _ Monkeys
are unreasonable animals; they delight in developing tuber¬
culosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they have a
liking for epidemics ; and they make scenes by cursing at their
masters in seven dialects.

“They’re so up-and-coming,” sighed Terry. I feel like
lettin’ ’em go and retiring to Birdies’ Rest to grow potatoes.
Why should we murder live-wires like them to save pasty-
faced, big-bellied humans from pneumonia?”

Their first task was to determine with accuracy the toler¬
ated dose of the quinine derivative, and to study its effects
on the hearing and vision, and on the kidneys, as shown by
endless determinations of blood sugar and blood urea. While
Martin did the injections and observed the effect on the mon¬
keys and lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all nightfall
next day, then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again)
on new methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.

This was the most difficult period of Martin’s life. To work,
staggering sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn
and to breakfast at a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural
and amusing, but to explain to Joyce why he had missed her
dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer whose grandfather had
been a Confederate General, this was impossible. He won a
brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss
her good-night, that he did appreciate the basket of sand¬
wiches which she had sent, and that he was about to remove
pneumonia from the human race, a statement which he health¬
ily doubted. . . ,

But when he had missed four dinners in succession , when
she had raged, “Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs
Thorn to be short a man at the last moment?” when she had
wailed “I didn’t so much mind your rudeness on the other
nights' but this evening when I had nothing to do and sat
home alone and waited for you” then he writhed.

ARRO WSMITH

422

Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their mon¬
keys and to treat them, and they had success which caused
them to waltz solemnly down the corridor. They could save
the monkeys from pneumonia invariably, when the infection
had gone but one day, and most of them on the second day
and the third.

Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain
number of the monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they
allowed for by simple-looking figures which took days of stiff,
shoulder-aching sitting over papers . . . one wild-haired col¬
larless man at a table, while the other walked among stinking
cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling them Bess and
Rover, and grunting placidly, “Oh, you would bite me, would
you, sweetheart!” and all the while, kindly but merciless as
the gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.

They came into a high upland where the air was thin with
failures. They studied in the test-tube the break-down
products of pneumococci — and failed. They constructed arti¬
ficial body fluids (carefully, painfully, inadequately), they
tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this artificial
blood — and failed.

Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came
down on them with laurels and fury.

He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia.
Very well! The Institute could do with the credit for curing
that undesirable disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly
publish their findings (mentioning McGurk) at once.

“We will not! Look here, Holabird!” snarled Terry, “I
thought you were going to let us alone.”

“I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your
research. And now you’ve completed it. It’s time to let the
world know what you’re doing.”

“If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more’n I
do! Nothing doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish in a year
from now.”

“You’ll publish now or — ”

“All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit!
And I’m so gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what
I think of you!”

Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He
patented the process of synthesizing his quinine derivative and
retired to Birdies’ Rest, to build a laboratory out of his small

ARROWSMITH 423

savings and spend a life of independent research supported by
a restricted sale of sera and of his drug.

For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but
for Martin it was not simple.

Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to
Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich
castle with flannel-shirt collaboration at Birdies’ Rest he had
not quite planned, but he was not going to be disloyal.

“Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn’t
dare touch me! I waited simply because I wanted to watch
Holabird figure out what I’d do. And now — ”

He was elucidating it to her in their — in her — car, on the
way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charm¬
ing to an important dowager that Joyce had crooned, “What
a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn’t be polite!”

“I’m free, by thunder at last I’m free, because I’ve worked
up to something that’s worth being free for ! ” he exulted.

She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, “Wait! I want
to think. Please! Do be quiet a moment.”.

Then: “Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett,
you’d have to be leaving me constantly.”

“Well—”

“I really don’t think that would be quite nice — I mean espe¬
cially now, because I fancy I’m going to have a baby.”

He made a sound of surprise.

“Oh, I’m not going to do the weeping mother. And I don’t
know whether I’m glad or furious, though I do believe I’d like
to have one baby. But it does complicate things, you know.
And personally, I should be sorry if you left the Institute,
which gives you a solid position, for a hole-and-corner exist¬
ence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven’t I? I really do
like you, you know! I don’t want you to desert me, and you
would if you went off to this horrid Vermont place.”

“Couldn’t we get a little house near there, and spend part

of the year?” ...

“Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of
bearing a Dear Little One is over, then think about it.

Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not
think about taking a house near Birdies’ Rest to the extent of
doing it.

CHAPTER XXXIX

With Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He
made a false start and did the worst work of his life. He had
lost his fierce serenity. He was too conscious of the ordeal
of a professional social life, and he could never understand
that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party — the painful enter¬
tainment of people whom one neither likes nor finds interesting.

So long as he had had a refuge in talking to Terry, he had
not been too irritated by well-dressed nonentities, and for a
time he had enjoyed the dramatic game of making Nice People
accept him. Now he was disturbed by reason.

Clif Clawson showed him how tangled his life had grown.

When he had first come to New York, Martin had looked
for Clif, whose boisterousness had been his comfort among
Angus Duers and Irving Watterses in medical school. _ Clif
was not to be found, neither at the motor agency for which he
had once worked nor elsewhere on Automobile Row. For
fourteen years Martin had not seen him.

Then to his laboratory at McGurk was brought a black-
and-red card:

Clifford L. Clawson
(Clif)

Top Notch Guaranteed Oil Investments

Higham Block
Butte

“Clif! Good old Clif! The best friend a man ever had!
That time he lent me the money to get to Leora! Old Clif!
By golly I need somebody like him, with Terry out of it and
all these tea-hounds around me!” exulted Martin.

He dashed out and stopped abruptly, staring at a man who
was, not softly, remarking to the girl reception-clerk:

“Well, sister, you scientific birds certainly do lay on the
agony! Never struck a swell er layout than you got here, ex-

424

ARRO WSMITH

425

cept in crook investment-offices — and I’ve never seen a nicer
cutie than you anywhere. How ’bout lil dinner one of these
beauteous evenings? I expect I’ll parley-vous with thou full
often now— I’m a great friend of Doc Arrowsmith. Fact I’m
a doc myself— honest — real sawbones — went to medic school
and everything. Ah! Here’s the boy!”

Martin had not allowed for the changes of fourteen years.
He was dismayed.

Clif Clawson, at forty, was gross. His face was sweaty, and
puffy with pale flesh; his voice was raw; he fancied checked
Norfolk jackets, tight across his swollen shoulders and his
beefy hips.

He bellowed, while he belabored Martin’s back:

“Well, well, well, well, well, well! Old Mart! Why, you old
son of a gun! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you damn’
old chicken-thief! Say, you skinny little runt, I’m a son of
a gun if you look one day older’n when I saw you last in
Zenith!”

Martin was aware of the bright leering of the once humble
reception-clerk. He said, “Well, gosh, it certainly is good to
see you,” and hastened to get Clif into the privacy of his
office.

“You look fine,” he lied, when they were safe. “What you
been doing with yourself? Leora and I did our best to look
you up, when we first came to New York. Uh — Do you
know about, uh, about her?”

“Yuh, I read about her passing away. Fierce luck. And
about your swell work in the West Indies — where was it? I
guess you’re a great man now — famous plague-chaser and all
that stuff, and world-renowned skee-entist. I don’t suppose
you remember your old friends now.”

“Oh, don’t be a chump! It’s — it’s — it’s fine to see you.”

“Well, I’m glad to observe you haven’t got the capitus en-
largaius, Mart. Golly, I says to meself says I, if I blew in
and old Mart high-hatted me, I’d just about come nigh unto
letting him hear the straight truth, after all the compliments
he’s been getting from the sassiety dames. I’m glad you’ve
kept your head. I thought about writing you from Butte —
been selling some bum oil-stock there and kind of got out
quick to save the inspectors the trouble of looking over my
books. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just sit down and write the
whey-faced runt a letter, and make him feel good by telling

426

ARROWS MITH

him how tickled I am over his nice work.’ But you know how
itTs— time kind of slips by. Well, this is exceUentus! Well
have a chance to see a whole lot of each other now. Im
going in with a fellow on an investment stunt here m New
York. Great pickings, old kid! I’ll take you out and s 0
you how to order a real feed, one of these days. Yell tell
me what you been doing since you got back from the W^
Indies. I suppose you’re laying your plans to try and get m
as the boss or president or whatever they call it of this gecele-

brated Institute.” , , T

“No— I uh well, I shouldn’t much care to be Director. I

prefer sticking to my lab., I— Perhaps you’d like to hear

about my work on phage.” . , , . 11r

Rejoicing to discover something of which he could talk,

Martin sketched his experiments.

Clif spanked his forehead with a spongy hand, and shouted.
“Wait! Say, I’ve got an idea — and you can come right m
on it. As I apperceive it, the dear oM Gen. Public is just
beginning to hear about this bac — what is it? bacteriophage
junk. Look here! Remember that old scoundrel Benom Carr
that I introduced as a great pharmacologist at the medical
banquet? Had din-din with him last eventide. He’s running
a sanitarium out on Long Island — slick idea, too practical y
he’s a bootlegger ; gets a lot of high-rollers out there and let s
’em have all the hooch they want, on prescriptions, absolutely
legal and water-tight! The parties they throw at that joint,
dames and everything! Believe me, Uncle Clil is sore stricken
with tootelus bootelus and is going to the Carr Sanitarium for
what ails him! But now look: Suppose we got him or some¬
body to rig up a new kind of cure — call it phageotherapy —
oh, it takes Uncle Clif to invent the names that claw in the
bounteous dollars! Patients sit in a steam cabinet and eat
tablets made of phage, with just a little strychnin to jazz up
their hearts! Bran-new! Million in it! What cha think?,,
Martin was almost feeble. “No, I’m afraid I’m against it.”
“Why?”

“Well, I— Honestly, Clif, if you don’t understand it, I
don’t know how I can explain the scientific attitude to you.
You know — that’s what Gottlieb used to call it — scientific atti¬
tude. And as I’m a scientist— least I hope I am— I couldn’t—
Well, to be associated with a thing like that — ”

“But, you poor louse, don’t you suppose I understand the

ARROWS MITH

427

scientific attitude? Gosh, I’ve seen a dissecting-room myself!
Why, you poor crab, of course I wouldn’t expect you to have
your name associated with it! You’d keep in the background
and slip us all the dope, and get a lot of publicity for phage
in general so the Dee-ah People would fall easier, and we’d
pull all the strong-arm work.”

“But — I hope you’re joking, Clif. If you weren’t joking,
I’d tell you that if anybody tried to pull a thing like that, I’d
expose ’em and get ’em sent to jail, no matter who they were!”

“Well, gosh, if you feel that way about it — 1”

Clif was peering over the fatty pads beneath his eyes. He
sounded doubtful:

“I suppose you have the right to keep other guys from grab¬
bing your own stuff. Well, all right, Mart. Got to be telod-
deling. Tell you what you might do, though, if that don’t
hurt your tender conscience, too : you might invite old Clif up
t’ the house for dinner, to meet the new lil wifey that I read
about in the sassiety journals. You might happen to remember,
old bean, that there have been times when you were glad
enough to let poor fat old Clif slip you a feed and a place to
sleep!”

“Oh, I know. You bet there have! Nobody was ever
decenter to me; nobody. Look. Where you staying? I’ll
find out from my wife what dates we have ahead, and tele¬
phone you to-morrow morning.”

“So you let the Old Woman keep the work-sheet for you,
huh? Well, I never butt into anybody’s business. I’m staying
at the Berrington Hotel, room 617 — ’member that, 617 — and
you might try and ’phone me before ten to-morrow. Say,
that’s one grand sweet song of a cutie you got on the door
here. What cha think? How’s chances on dragging her out
to feed and shake a hoof with Uncle Clif?”

As primly as the oldest, most staid scientist in the Institute,
Martin protested, “Oh, she belongs to a very nice family. I
don’t think I should try it. Really, I’d rather you didn’t.”

Clif’s gaze was sharp, for all its fattiness.

With excessive cordiality, with excessive applause when Clif
remarked, “You better go back to work and put some salt on
a coupla bacteria’s tails,” Martin guided him to the reception-
room, safely past the girl clerk, and to the elevator.

For a long time he sat in his office and was thoroughly
wretched.

ARROWSMITH

428

He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry
Wickett. He saw that Clif was as different from Terry as from
Rippleton Holabird. Terry was rough, he was surly, he was
colloquial, he despised many fine and gracious things, he of¬
fended many fine and gracious people, but these acerbities
made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion
to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew. But Clif —

“I’d do the world a service by killing that man!” Martin
fretted. “Phageotherapy at a yegg sanitarium! I stand him
only because I’m too much of a coward to risk his going around
saying that ‘in the days of my Success, I’ve gone back on my
old friends.’ (Success! Puddling at work! Dinners! Talk¬
ing to idiotic women! Being furious because you weren’t in¬
vited to the dinner to the Portuguese minister!) No. I’ll
’phone Clif we can’t have him at the house.”

Over him came remembrance of Clif’s loyalty in the old
barren days, and Clif’s joy to share with him every pathetic
gain.

“Why should he understand my feeling about phage? Was
his scheme any worse than plenty of reputable drug-firms?
How much was I righteously offended, and how much was I
sore because he didn’t recognize the high social position of the
rich Dr. Arrowsmith?”

He gave up the question, went home, explained almost
frankly to Joyce what her probable opinion of Clif would be,
and contrived that Clif should be invited to dinner with only
the two of them.

“My dear Mart,” said Joyce, “why do you insult me by
hinting that I’m such a snob that I’ll be offended by racy
slang, and by business ethics very much like those of dear
Roger’s grandpapa? Do you think I’ve never ventured out
of the drawing-room? I thought you’d seen me outside it!
I shall probably like your Clawson person very much indeed.”

The day after Martin had invited him to dinner, Clif tele¬
phoned to Joyce:

“This Mrs. Arrowsmith? Well, say, this is old Clif.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch it.”

“Clif! Old Clif!”

“I’m frightfully sorry but — Perhaps there’s a bad con¬
nection.”

“Why, it’s Mr. Clawson, that’s going to feed with you on — ”

“Oh, of course. I am so sorry.”

ARROWS M IT H

429

“Well, look: What I wanted to know is: Is this going to be
just a homey grub-grabbing or a real soiree? In other words,
honey, shall I dress natural or do I put on the soup-and-fish?
Oh, I got ’em — swallow-tail and the whole darn’ outfit!”

“I — Do you mean — Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I
think perhaps I would.”

“Attaboy! I’ll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I’ll
show you folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever
laid eyes on. Well, it’s been a great pleezhure to meet Mart’s
Missus, and we will now close with singing ‘Till We Meet
Again’ or ‘Au Reservoir.’ ”

When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, “Sweet, I
can’t do it! The man must be mad. Really, dear, you just
take care of him and let me go to bed. Besides: you two
won’t want me — you’ll want to talk over old times, and I’d
only interfere. And with baby coming in two months now, I
ought to go to bed early.”

“Oh, Joy, Clif’d be awfully offended, and he’s always been
so decent to me and — And you’ve often asked me about my
cub days. Don’t you want,” plaintively, “to hear about ’em?”

“Very well, dear. I’ll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but
I warn you I sha’n’t be a success.”

They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be
raucous, would drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back.
But when he appeared for dinner he was agonizingly polite and
flowery — till he became slightly drunk. When Martin said
“damn,” Clif reproved him with, “Of course I’m only a hick,
but I don’t think a lady like the Princess here would like you
to cuss.”

And, “Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to
marry the real bon-ton article.”

And, “Oh, maybe it didn’t cost something to furnish this
dining-room, oh, not a-tall!”

And, “Champagne, heh? Well, you’re certainly doing poor
old Clif proud. Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat
to tell his valay to tell my secretary the address of your boot¬
legger, will you?”

In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and ele¬
gant vocabulary, Clif chronicled the jest of selling oil-wells
unprovided with oil and of escaping before the law Closed in ,
the cleverness of joining churches for the purpose of selling
stock to the members; and the edifying experience of assisting

43o ARROWSMITH

Dr. Benoni Carr to capture a rich and senile widow for his
sanitarium by promising to provide medical consultation from
the spirit-world.

Joyce was silent through it all, and so superbly polite that
every one was wretched.

Martin struggled to make a liaison between them, and he
had no elevating remarks about the strangeness of a man’s
boasting of his own crookedness, but he was coldly furious

when Clif blundered: „

“You said old Gottlieb was sort of down on his luck now.

“Yes, he’s not very well.”

“Poor old coot. But I guess you’ve realized by now how
foolish you were when you used to fall for him like seven
and a half brick. Honestly, Lady Arrowsmith, this kid used
to think Pa Gottlieb was the cat’s pajamas— begging your
pardon for the slanguageness.”

“What do you mean?” said Martin.

“Oh, I’m onto Gottlieb! Of course you know as well as I
do that he always was a self -advertiser, getting himself talked
about by confidin’ to the whole ops tcvraya what a strict scien¬
tist he was, and putting on a lot of dog and emitting these wise
cracks about philosophy and what fierce guys the regular docs
were. But what’s worse than — Out in San Diego I ran onto
a fellow that used to be an instructor in botany in Winnemac,
and he told me that with all this antibody stuff of his, Gott¬
lieb never gave any credit to — well, he was some Russian that
did most of it before and Pa Gottlieb stole all his stuff.”

That in this charge against Gottlieb there was a hint of
truth, that he knew the great god to have been at times un¬
generous, merely increased the rage which was clenching Mar¬
tin’s fist in his lap.

Three years before, he would have thrown something, but
he was an adaptable person. He had yielded to Joyce’s train¬
ing in being quietly instead of noisily disagreeable; and his
only comment was “No, I think you’re wrong, Clif. Gottlieb
has carried the antibody work ’way beyond all the others.”

Before the coffee and liqueurs had come into the drawing¬
room, (Joyce begged, at her prettiest, “Mr. Clawson, do you
mind awfully if I slip up to bed? I’m so frightfully glad to
have had the opportunity of meeting one of my husband’s
oldest friends, but I’m not feeling very well, and I do think
I’d be wise to have some rest.”

43i

ARROWS M IT H

“Madam the Princess, I noticed you were looking peeked.”

“Oh! Well— Good night!”

Martin and Clif settled in large chairs in the drawing-room,
and tried to play at being old friends happy in meeting. They
did not look at each other.

After Clif had cursed a little and told three sound smutty
stories, to show that he had not been spoiled and that he had
been elegant only to delight Joyce, he flung:

“Huh! So that is that, as the Englishers remark. Well, 1
could see your Old Lady didn’t cotton to me. . She was just as
chummy as an iceberg. But gosh, I don’t mind. She s going
to have a kid, and of course women, all of ’em, get cranky
when they’re that way. But — ”

He hiccuped, looked sage, and bolted his fifth cognac.

“But what I never could figure out — Mind you, I'm not
criticizing the Old Lady. She’s as swell as they make ’em.
But what I can’t understand is how after living, with Leora,
who was the real thing, you can stand a hoity-toity skirt like

Joycey!”

Then Martin broke.

The misery of not being able to work, these months since

Terry had gone, had gnawed at him.

“Look here, Clif. I won’t have you discuss my wile, i m
sorry she doesn’t please you, but I’m afraid that in this par¬
ticular matter — ” . ,.

Clif had risen, not too steadily, though his voice and his

eyes were resolute. . , . , ,

“All right. I figured out you were going to high-bat me.

Of course I haven’t got a rich wife to slip me money. I m
just a plain old hobo. I don’t belong in a place like this.
Not smooth enough to be a butler. You are. All right. I
wish you luck. And meanwhile you can go plumb to hell, my
young friend!”

Martin did not pursue him into the hall.

As ne sat alone he groaned, “Thank Heaven, that operation s

°VRe told himself that Clif was a crook,. a fool, and. a fat
waster- he told himself that Clif was a cynic without wisdom,
a drunkard without charm, and a philanthropist who was gen¬
erous only because it larded his vanity But these admirable
truths did not keep the operation from hurting any more than
it would have eased the removal of an appendix to be told

432 ARROWSMITH

that it was a bad appendix, an appendix without delicacy or
value.

He had loved Clif — did love him and always would. But
he would never see him again. Never!

The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at
Gottlieb! His boorishness! Life was too short for —

“But hang it — yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He’s a
crook, but wasn’t I a crook to fake my plague figures m St.
Hubert— and the worse crook because I got praise for it?”

He bobbed up to Joyce’s room. She was lying in her im¬
mense four-poster, reading “Peter Whiffle.”

“Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn’t it!” she said.
“He’s gone?”

“Yes. . . . He’s gone. . . . I’ve driven out the best friend
I ever had— practically. I let him go, let him go off feeling
that he was a rotter and a failure. It would have been
decenter to have killed him. Oh, why couldn’t you have been
simple and jolly with him? You were so confoundedly polite!
He was uneasy and unnatural, and showed up worse than he
really is. He’s no tougher than— he’s a lot better than the
financiers who cover up their stuff by being suave. . . . Poor
devil! I’ll bet right now Clif’s tramping in the rain, saying,
‘The one man I ever loved and tried to do things for has
turned against me, now he’s — now he has a lovely wife. What’s
the use of ever being decent?’ he’s saying. . . . Why couldn’t
you be simple, and chuck your highfalutin’ manners for once?”

“See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and
I will not have you blame it on me! You’ve grown beyond
him. You that are always blaring about Facts — can’t you face
the fact? For once, at least, it’s not my fault. You may per¬
haps remember, my king of men, that I had the good sense
to suggest that I shouldn’t appear to-night; not meet him at
all.”

“Oh — well — yes — gosh — but — Oh, I suppose so. Well,
anyway — It’s over, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn’t it good
it is over! Kiss me good-night.”

“But” — Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and
lost and homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies
on black silk which she had bought for him in Paris — “but
if it’d been Leora instead of Joyce — Leora would’ve known
Clif was a crook, and she’d’ve accepted it as a fact. (Talk

ARROWS MITH

433

about your facing facts!) She wouldn’t’ve insisted on sitting
as a judge. She wouldn’t’ve said, ‘This is different from me,
so it’s wrong.’ She’d’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so
it’s interesting.’ Leora — ”

He had a sharp, terrifying vision of her, lying there coffin¬
less, below the mold in a garden on the Penrith Hills.

He came out of it to growl, “What was it Clif said? ‘You’re
not her husband — you’re her butler — you’re too smooth.’ He
was right! The whole point is: I’m not allowed to see who
I want to. I’ve been so clever that I’ve made myself the slave
of Joyce and Holy Holabird.”

He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson
again.

It happened that both Joyce’s and Martin’s paternal grand¬
fathers had been named John, and John Arrowsmith they
called their son. They did not know it, but a certain John
Arrowsmith, mariner of Devonport, had died in the matter of
the Spanish Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.

Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin’s love for
her (he did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).

“Death’s a better game than bridge — you have no partner
to help you!” she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on
a chair of torture and indignity; when before they would give
her the anesthetic, her face was green with agony.

John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb
— ten good pounds he weighed at birth — and he was gay of
eye when he had ceased to be a raw wrinkled grub and be¬
come a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was
afraid of him, because he saw that this miniscule aristocrat,
this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day
condescend to him.

Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk
than ever about putting and back-hand service and hats and
Russian emigres.

For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding.
Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was

ARROWS MITH

434

glowing, making diagrams with his thumb-nail on the table¬
cloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious “Darling — do

you mind _ just a second — Plinder, isn’t there any more of

the sherry?”

When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind
his enthusiasm was gone.

She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes,
and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she
never sat back watching for silent hours.

Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he
touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage
on the mutation of bacterial species — very beautiful, very
delicate — and after plodding months when he had been a
sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-
player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness
of high taut insanity.

He wanted to work nights, every night. During his un¬
inspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the
Institute after five, and Joyce had become used to having
him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to
ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked
him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the
baby.

“I’ve got to work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular
and easy about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any
more than you could be regular and easy and polite when you
were gestating the baby.”

“I know but — Darling, you get so nervous when you’re
working like this. Heavens, I don’t care how much you offend
people by missing engagements — well, after all, I wish you
wouldn’t, but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when
you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time
in the long run? It’s just for your own sake. Oh, I have it!
Wait! You’ll see what a scientist I am! No, I won’t explain
■ — not yet!”

Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim,
gallant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, “I’ve got a sur¬
prise for you!”

She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind
their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from
the most immaculate and elaborate scientific supply-house in
the country, she had created for him the best bacteriological

ARROWS MITH

435

laboratory he had ever seen — white-tile floor and enameled
brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and stains and
microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath — and a tech¬
nician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom
behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to
serve Dr. Arrowsmith day or night.

“There!” sang Joyce. “Now when you simply must work
evenings, jmu won’t have to go clear down to Liberty Street.
You can duplicate your cultures, or whatever you call ’em.
If you’re bored at dinner — all right! You can slip out here
afterward, and work as late as ever you want. Is — Sweet,
is it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so hard— I got
the best men I could — ”

While his lips were against hers he brooded, “To have done
this for me! And to be so humble! . . . And now, curse it,
I’ll never be able to get away by myself!”

She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to
give her the novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that
the centrifuge was inadequate.

“You wait, my man!” she crowed.

Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera,
she led him to the cement-floored garage beneath his new
laboratory, and in a corner, ready to be set up, was a second¬
hand but adequate centrifuge, a most adequate centrifuge, the
masterpiece of the great firm of Berkeley-Saunders — in fact
none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from McGurk for her
sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and get
bountifully drunk.

It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he
worked at it.

Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce
sections of Joyce’s set the rumor panted that there was a
new diversion in an exhausted world — going out to Martin’s
laboratory and watching him work, and being ever so silent
and reverent, except perhaps when Joyce murmured, “Isn’t he
adorable the way he teaches his darling bacteria to say ‘Pretty
Polly’!” or when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing
that scientists had no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre
burst out in his marvelous burlesque of jazz:.

436

ARRO WSMITH

Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don’t you gri-in at me;
You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I’m o-on-to thee.

When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith’s done looked at de clues,
You’ll sit in jail a-singin’ dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.

Joyce’s cousin from Georgia sparkled, “Mart is so cute with
all those lil vases of his. But Ah can always get him so mad
by tellin’ him the trouble with him is, he don’t go to church
often enough!”

While Martin sought to concentrate.

They flocked from the house to his laboratory only once a
week, which was certainly not enough to disturb a resolute
man — merely enough to keep him constantly waiting for them.

When he sedately tried to explain this and that to Joyce,
she said, “Did we bother you this evening? But they do ad¬
mire you so.”

He remarked, “Well,” and went to bed.

R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away
from the Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife:

“I don’t mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks
you’re a chump, but I do mind his being bored at your daring
to express any opinion whatever. . . . Didn’t he look silly,
out in his idiotic laboratory! . . . How the deuce do you
suppose Joyce ever came to marry him?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I can only think of one reason. Of course she may — ”

“Now please don’t be filthy!”

“Well, anyway — She who might have picked any number
of well-bred, agreeable, intelligent chaps — and I mean intelli¬
gent, because this Arrowsmith person may know all about
germs, but he doesn’t know a symphony from a savory. . . .
I don’t think I’m too fussy, but I don’t quite see why we
should go to a house where the host apparently enjoys flatly
contradicting you. . . . Poor devil, I’m really sorry for him;
probably he doesn’t even know when he’s being rude.”

“No. Perhaps. What hurts is to think of old Roger — so
gay, so strong, real Skull and Bones — and to have this abrupt
Outsider from the tall grass sitting in his chair, failing to
appreciate his Pol Roger — What Joyce ever saw in him!

ARROWSMITH 437

Though he does have nice eyes and such funny strong
hands — ”

Joyce’s busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy
it was hard to ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a
noble butler, and two nurses for the baby. But she often said
that she was never allowed to attain her one ambition: to sit
and read.

Terry had once called her The Arranger, and though
Martin resented it, when he heard the telephone bell he
groaned, “Oh, Lord, there’s The Arranger — wants me to come
to tea with some high-minded hen.”

When he sought to explain that he must be free from en¬
tanglements, she suggested, “Are you such a weak, irresolute,
little man that the only way you can keep concentrated is by
running away? Are you afraid of the big men who can do
big wrork, and still stop and play?”

He was likely to turn abusive, particularly as to her defini¬
tion of Big Men, and when he became hot and vulgar, she
turned grande dame, so that he felt like an impertinent servant
and was the more vulgar.

He was afraid of her then. He imagined fleeing to Leora,
and the two of them, frightened little people, comforting each
other and hiding from her in snug corners.

But often enough Joyce was his companion, seeking new
amusements as surprises for him, and in their son they had a
binding pride. He sat watching little John, rejoicing in his
strength.

It was in early winter, after she had royally taken the baby
South for a fortnight, that Martin escaped for a week with
Terry at Birdies’ Rest.

He found Terry tired and a little surly, after months of
working absolutely alone. He had constructed beside the home
cabin a shanty for laboratory, and a rough stable for the horses
which he used in the preparation of his sera. Terry did not,
as once he would have, flare into the details of his research,
and not till evening, when they smoked before the rough fire¬
place of the cabin, loafing in chairs made of barrels cushioned
with elk skin, could Martin coax him into confidences.

He had been compelled to give up much of his time to

438

ARROWSMITH

mere housework and the production of the sera which paid
his expenses. “If you’d only been with me, I could have
accomplished something.” But his quinine derivative research
had gone on solidly, and he did not regret leaving McGurk.
He had found it impossible to work with monkeys; they were
too expensive, and too fragile to stand the Vermont winter;
but he had contrived a method of using mice infected with
pneumococcus and —

“Oh, what’s the use of my telling you this, Slim? You’re
not interested, or you’d have been up here at work with me,
months ago. You’ve chosen between Joyce and me. All
right, but you can’t have both.”

Martin snarled, “I’m very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett,”
and slammed out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow,
blundering in darkness against stumps, he knew the agony of
his last hour, the hour of failure.

“I’ve lost Terry, now (though I won’t stand his imperti¬
nence!). I’ve lost everybody, and I’ve never really had
Joyce. I’m completely alone. And I can only half work!
I’m through! They’ll never let me get to work again I”

Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not
going to give up.

He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, “You
old grouch, we got to stick together!”

Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far
from tears; and as they roughly patted each other’s shoulders
they growled, “Fine pair of fools, scrapping just because we’re
tired!”

“I will come and 'work with you, somehow!” Martin swore.
“I’ll get a six-months’ leave from the Institute, and have Joyce
stay at some hotel near here, or do something. Gee! Back
to real work. . . . Work! ... Now tell me: When I come
up here, what d’you say we — ”

They talked till dawn.

CHAPTER XL

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and
Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He
admired Joyce’s pearls, and when the squabs had been served
he turned on Martin with friendly intensity:

“Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly?
Things are happening, Martin, and I want you — no, Science
wants you! — to take your proper part in them. I needn’t, by
the way, hint that this is absolutely confidential. Dr. Tubbs
and his League of Cultural Agencies are beginning to accom¬
plish marvels, and Colonel Minnigen has been extraordinarily
liberal.

“They’ve gone at the League with exactly the sort of thor¬
oughness and taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb
have always insisted on. For four years now they’ve stuck to
making plans. I happen to know that Dr. Tubbs and the
council of the League have had the most wonderful conferences
with college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and labor-
leaders (the sound, sensible ones, of course) and efficiency-
experts and the more advanced advertising-men and ministers,
and all the other leaders of public thought.

“They’ve worked out elaborate charts classifying all intel¬
lectual occupations and interests, with the methods and mate¬
rials and tools, and especially the goals — the aims, the ideals,
the moral purposes — that are suited to each of them. Really
tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example,
could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was
progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his
trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is
ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.

“McGurk Institute simply must get in on this coordination,
which I regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking
that has ever been made. We are at last going to make all the
erstwhile chaotic spiritual activities of America really conform
to the American ideal; we’re going to make them as practical

439

440

ARROWSMITH

and supreme as the manufacture of cash-registers ! I have
certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross McGurk and
Minnigen together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lum¬
ber interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably
quit the Institute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural
Agencies. Then we’ll need a new Director of McGurk who will
work with us and help us bring Science out of the monastery
to serve Mankind.”

By this time Martin understood everything about the
League except what the League was trying to do.

Holabird went on:

“Now I know, Martin, that you’ve always rather sneered
at Practicalness, but I have faith in you! I believe you’ve
been too much under the influence of Wickett, and now that
he’s gone and you’ve seen more of life and of Joyce’s set and
mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh! without in any
way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a broader
view.

“I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I
think I’m safe in saying he would succeed me as full Director.
Sholtheis wants the place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap
at it," but I haven’t yet found any of them that are quite Our
Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I daresay in a year or two,
you will be Director of McGurk Institute!”

Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs.
Holabird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion,
and Joyce was ecstatic over the honor to her Man.

Martin stammered, “W-why, I’ll have to think it over. Sort
of unexpected — ”

The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed
himself picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he
would rule, coordinate, standardize, and make useful the whole
world of intelligence, from trousers-designing to poetry, that
he did not resent Martin’s silence. At parting he chanted,
“Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your decision to¬
morrow. By the way, I think we’ll get rid of Pearl Robbins ;
she’s been useful but now she considers herself indispensable.
But that’s a detail. . . . Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin,
dear old boy! You’ve grown and calmed down, and you’ve
widened your interests so much, this past year!”

In their car, in that moving curtained room under the
crystal dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.

ARROWSMITH

441

“Isn’t it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton
can bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that
whole great Institute, when just a few years ago you were
only a cub there! But haven’t I perhaps helped, just a lit¬
tle?”

Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car,
the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smoth¬
ering prison. He wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur
—His Own Sort! — facing the winter. He tried to look as
though he were meditating, in an awed, appreciative manner,
but he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to begin the
slaughter. Slowly:

“Would you really like to see me Director?”

“Of course! All that — Oh, you know; I don’t just mean
the prominence and respect, but the power to accomplish
good.”

“Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out inter¬
views, buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools,
advising men about whose work I don’t know a blame’ thing?”

“Oh, don’t be so superior! Some one has to do these things.
And that’d be only a small part of it. Think of the oppor¬
tunity of encouraging some youngster who wanted a chance
to do splendid science!”

“And give up my own chance?”

“Why need you? You’d be head of your own department
just the same. And even if you did give up — You are so
stubborn! It’s lack of imagination. You think that because
you’ve started in on one tiny branch of mental activity, there’s
nothing else in the world. It’s just as when I persuaded you
that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a week
or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of
golf, the world of science wouldn’t immediately stop! No
imagination! You’re precisely like these business men you’re
always cursing because they can’t see anything in life beyond
their soap-factories or their banks!”

“And you really would have me give up my work — ”

He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never
understood what he was up to, had not comprehended one
word about the murderous effect of the directorship on Gott¬
lieb.

He was silent again, and before they reached home she said
only, “You know I’m the last person to speak of money, but

ARRO WSMITH

442

really, it’s you who have so often brought up the matter of
hating to be dependent on me, and you know as Director you
would make so much more that — Forgive me!”

She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic
elevator.

He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, “Yes, it is the first
chance I’ve had to really contribute to the expenses here.
Sure! Willing to take her money, but not to do anything in
return, and then call it ‘devotion to science!’ Well, I’ve got
to decide right now — •”

He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped
to decision without it. He marched into Joyce’s room, irri¬
tated by its snobbishness of discreet color. He was checked
by the miserable way in which she sat brooding on the edge
of her day couch, but he flung:

“I’m not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Insti¬
tute — and Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not
get buried in this pompous fakery of giving orders and — ”

“Mart! Listen! Don’t you want your son to be proud
of you?”

“Um. Well — No, not if he’s to be proud of me for being
a stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker — ”

“Please don’t be vulgar.”

“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough
lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right
now, and work with Terry.”

“I wish I had some way of showing you — Oh, for a
‘scientist’ you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish
I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The
wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It’s just the
absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that
sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re getting
strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away
from it.”

“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he
can live cheaper there. If we — if he could afford it, he’d prob¬
ably be right here in town, with gargons and everything, like
McGurk, but with no Director Holabird by God — and no
Director Arrowsmith!”

“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry
Wickett!”

“Now by God let me tell you — ”

443

ARROWSMITH

“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a
‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expres¬
sions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”

“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that
I’m thinking of joining Terry.”

“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to
go off and wear a flannel shirt, and be peculiar and very,
very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose
every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul
ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I
were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by
taking in washing — ”

“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing!
No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer.
But — I imagine it’s just that argument that’s kept almost
everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a ma¬
chine for digestion and propagation and obedience.. .The
answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly
leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you
very property call it, and those of us that are pioneers ^Oh,
this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I’m a
hero or a fool or a deserter or anything you like, but the fact
is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work,
and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You’ve
been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been

mine. Good-by.” . .

“Darling, darling — We’ll talk it over again in the morn¬
ing, when you aren’t so excited. . . . And an hour ago I was

so proud of you!”

“All right. Good-night.”

But before morning, taking two suit-cases and a bag ot his
roughest clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the
hardest thing he had ever written, kissing his son^and mut¬
tering, “Come to me when you grow up, old man, he. went
to a cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched on the rickety
iron bed, he grieved for their love. Before noon he had gone
to the Institute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus
and notes and books and materials, refused to answer a tele¬
phone call from Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.

Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who
of late had ridden in silken private cars) , he grinned with the
joy of no longer having to toil at dinner-parties.

444 ARROWSMITH

He drove up to Birdies’ Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was
chopping wood, in a mess of chip-littered snow.

“Hello, Terry. Come for keeps.”

“Fine, Slim. Say, there’s a lot of dishes in the shack need
washing.”

He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to
wash in icy water was agony ; to tramp for three hours through
fluffy snow exhausted him. But the rapture of being allowed
to work twenty-four hours a day without leaving an experi¬
ment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner, of
plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and
furious as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along,
and he felt himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on
yielding to Joyce so far as to allow her to build a better
laboratory for them, and more civilized quarters.

With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and
just a simple decent bathroom —

She had written, “You have been thoroughly beastly, and
any attempt at reconciliation, if that is possible now, which
I rather doubt, must come from you.”

He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not
mentioning the platform word Reconciliation.

They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the
action of their quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the
mice which Terry had contrived to use instead of monkeys,
because of their size. Martin had brought with him strains
of Bacillus lepisepticus, which causes a pleuro-pneumonia in
rabbits, and their first labor was to discover whether their
original compound was effective against this bacillus as well
as against pneumococcus. Profanely they found that it was
not; profanely and patiently they trudged into an infinitely
complicated search for a compound that should be.

They earned their living by preparing sera which rather
grudgingly they sold to physicians of whose honesty they were
certain, abruptly refusing the popular drug-vendors. They
thus received surprisingly large sums, and among all clever

ARROWS MITH

445

people it was believed that they were too coyly shrewd to be
sincere.

Martin worried as much over what he considered his treach¬
ery to Clif Clawson as over his desertion of Joyce and John,
but this worrying he did only when he could not sleep. Regu¬
larly, at three in the morning, he brought both Joyce and
honest Clif to Birdies’ Rest; and regularly, at six, when he
was frying bacon, he forgot them.

Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and
success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper
berth or lower was the same to him, and till Martin was
hardened to cold and fatigue, Terry did more than his share
of wood-cutting and supply-toting, and with great melody
and skill he washed their clothes.

He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up to¬
gether season on season, would quarrel. He planned with
Martin that the laboratory scheme should be extended to
include eight (but never more!) maverick and undomestic
researchers like themselves, who should contribute to the ex¬
penses of the camp by manufacturing sera, but otherwise do
their own independent work — whether it should be the struc¬
ture of the atom, or a disproof of the results of Drs. Wickett
and Arrowsmith. Two rebels, a chemist now caught in a drug-
firm and a university professor, were coming next autumn.

“It’s kind of a mis’able return to monasteries,” grumbled
Terry, “except that we’re not trying to solve anything for
anybody but our own fool selves. Mind you! When this place
becomes a shrine, and a lot of cranks begin to creep in here,
then you and I got to beat it, Slim. We’ll move farther back
in the woods, or if we feel too old for that, we’ll take another
shot at professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr.
Holabird.”

For the first time Martin’s work began definitely to draw
ahead of Terry’s.

His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound
as Terry’s, his indifference to publicity and to flowery hang¬
ings as great, his industry as fanatical, his ingenuity in de¬
vising new apparatus at least comparable, and his imagination
far more swift. He had less ease but more passion. He hurled
out hypotheses like sparks. He began, incredulously, to com¬
prehend his freedom. He would yet determine the essential
nature of phage; and as he became stronger and surer — and

ARROWSMITH

446

no doubt less human — he saw ahead of him innumerous in¬
quiries into chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures
to keep him busy for decades.

It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever
seen and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the
first plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before
breakfast, they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped
twenty miles on end, they had blue jays and squirrels for in¬
terested neighbors; and when they had worked ail night, they
came out to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.

Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he
hummed.

And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed
almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling
up their woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in
tweeds, stepped Joyce.

He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory
shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.

“It’s a sweet place, really!” she said, and amiably kissed
him. “Let’s walk down by the lake.”

In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved
to grip her shoulders.

She cried, “Darling, I have missed you! You’re wrong
about lots of things, but you’re right about this — you must
work, and not be disturbed by a lot of silly people. Do you
like my tweeds? Don’t they look wildernessy? You see, I’ve
come to stay! I’ll build a house near here; perhaps right
across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over
there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land — ■
probably some horrid tight-fisted old farmer owns it. Can’t
you just see it: a wide low house, with enormous verandas
and red awnings — ”

“And visitors coming?”

“I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?”

Desperately, “Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just
now, to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing
a lot of people — and there’d probably be a rotten noisy motor
launch. Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation.
Why, Terry would go crazy! You are lovely! But you want
a playmate, and I want to work. I’m afraid you can’t stay.
No.”

“And our son is to be left without your care?”

ARROWSMITH

447

“He— ■ Would he have my care if I died? ... He is a
nice kid, too! I hope he won’t be a Rich Man! . . . Per¬
haps ten years from now he’ll come to me here.”

“And live like this?”

“Sure — unless I’m broke. Then he won’t live so well. We
have meat practically every day now!”

“I see! And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry
some waitress or some incredibly stupid rustic? From what
you’ve told me, he rather fancies that sort of girl!”

“Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would
be the one thing that could break me.”

“Martin, aren’t you perhaps a little insane?”

“Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you —
You look here now, Joy! We’re insane but we’re not cranks!
Yesterday an 'esoteric healer’ came here because he thought
this was a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles,
and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh. Let
me think.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t believe we’re
insane. We’re farmers.”

“Martin, it’s too infinitely diverting to find you becoming
a fanatic, and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a
fanatic. You’ve left common sense. I am common sense. I
believe in bathing! Good-by!”

“Now you look here. By golly — ”

She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.

As the chauffeur manoeuvered among the stumps of the clear¬
ing, for a moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they
stared at each other, through tears. They had never been so
frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which recalled
every jest, every tenderness, every twilight they had known to¬
gether. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he remembered
that he had been doing an experiment —

On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Picker-
baugh was dining with the President of the United States.

“When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President,
“I hope we shall see you a cabinet-member — the first Secre¬
tary of Health and Eugenics in the country!”

That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a
meeting of celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of

ARROW SMITH

448

Cultural Agencies. Among the men of measured merriment
on the platform were Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the new Director
of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer, head of the Duer
Clinic and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn Medical
College.

Dr. Holabird’s epochal address was being broadcast by radio
to a million ardently listening lovers of science.

That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota,
was attending mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick
sedan awaited him outside, and with modest satisfaction he
heard the minister gloat:

“The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be
rewarded with a great reward and their feet shall walk in glad¬
ness, saith the Lord of Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of
Belial, they shall be slain betimes and cast down into darkness
and failure, and in the busy marts shall they be forgot.”

That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a
dark small room above the banging city street. Only his eyes
were alive.

That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-
waving ridge where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost
among cinders, and a depression in a garden marked the grave
of Leora.

That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham
Ireland, Joyce admitted, “Yes, if I do divorce him, I may
marry you. I know! He’s never going to see how egotistical
it is to think he’s the only man living who’s always right!”

That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled
in a clumsy boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far
out on the water.

“I feel as if I were really beginning to work now,” said
Martin. “This new quinine stuff may prove pretty good.
We’ll plug along on it for two or three years, and maybe
we’ll get something permanent — and probably we’ll fail!”

END

•v

Date Due

jfc

TRENT UN

VERS TY

164 0048496 4

PS3523 . E94A7 1925

Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951.
Arrowsmith .

338691

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